Podcast appearances and mentions of frederick taylor

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Best podcasts about frederick taylor

Latest podcast episodes about frederick taylor

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast
BONUS: From Waterfall to Flow—Rethinking Mental Models in Software Delivery | Henrik Mårtensson

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2025 49:44


BONUS: From Waterfall to Flow—Rethinking Mental Models in Software Delivery With Henrik Mårtensson In this BONUS episode, we explore the origins and persistence of waterfall methodology in software development with management consultant Henrik Mårtensson. Based on an article where he details the history of Waterfall, Henrik explains the historical context of waterfall, challenges the mental models that keep it alive in modern organizations, and offers insights into how systems thinking can transform our approach to software delivery. This conversation is essential for anyone looking to understand why outdated methodologies persist and how to move toward more effective approaches to software development. The True Origins of Waterfall "Waterfall came from the SAGE project, the first large software project in history, where they came up with a methodology based on an economic analysis." Henrik takes us on a fascinating historical journey to uncover the true origins of waterfall methodology. Contrary to popular belief, the waterfall approach wasn't invented by Winston Royce but emerged from the SAGE project in the 1950s. Bennington published the original paper outlining this approach, while it was Bell and Tayer who later named it "waterfall" when referencing Royce's work. Henrik explains how gated process models eventually led to the formalized waterfall methodology and points out that an entire generation of methods existed between waterfall and modern Agile approaches that are often overlooked in the conversation. In this segment we refer to:  The paper titled “Production of Large Computer Programs” by Herbert D. Benington (direct PDF link) Updated and re-published in 1983 in Annals of the History of Computing ( Volume: 5, Issue: 4, Oct.-Dec. 1983) Winston Royce's paper from 1970 that erroneously is given the source of the waterfall term. Direct PDF Link. Bell and Thayer's paper “Software Requirements: Are They Really A Problem?”, that finally “baptized” the waterfall process. Direct PDF link.   Mental Models That Keep Us Stuck "Fredrik Taylor's model of work missed the concept of a system, leading us to equate busyness with productivity." The persistence of waterfall thinking stems from outdated mental models about work and productivity. Henrik highlights how Frederick Taylor's scientific management principles continue to influence software development despite missing the crucial concept of systems thinking. This leads organizations to equate busyness with productivity, as illustrated by Henrik's anecdote about 50 projects assigned to just 70 people. We explore how project management practices often enforce waterfall thinking, and why organizations tend to follow what others do rather than questioning established practices. Henrik emphasizes several critical concepts that are often overlooked: Systems thinking Deming's principles Understanding variation and statistics Psychology of work Epistemology (how we know what we know) In this segment, we refer to:  Frederik Taylor's book “The Principles of Scientific Management” The video explaining why Project Management leads to Coordination Chaos James C. Scott's book, “Seeing Like a State” Queueing theory Little's Law The Estimation Trap "The system architecture was overcomplicated, and the organizational structure followed it, creating a three-minute door unlock that required major architectural changes." Henrik shares a compelling story about a seemingly simple feature—unlocking a door—that was estimated to take three minutes but actually required significant architectural changes due to Conway's Law. This illustrates how organizational structures often mirror system architecture, creating unnecessary complexity that impacts delivery timelines. The anecdote serves as a powerful reminder of how estimation in software development is frequently disconnected from reality when we don't account for systemic constraints and architectural dependencies. In this segment, we refer to Conway's Law, the observation that explicitly called out how system architecture is so often linked to organizational structures. Moving Beyond Waterfall "Understanding queueing theory and Little's Law gives us the tools to rethink flow in software delivery." To move beyond waterfall thinking, Henrik recommends several resources and concepts that can help transform our approach to software development. By understanding queueing theory and Little's Law, teams can better manage workflow and improve delivery predictability. Henrik's article on coordination chaos highlights the importance of addressing organizational complexity, while James C. Scott's book "Seeing Like a State" provides insights into how central planning often fails in complex environments. About Henrik Mårtensson Henrik Mårtensson is a management consultant specializing in strategy, organizational development, and process improvement. He blends Theory of Constraints, Lean, Agile, and Six Sigma to solve complex challenges. A published author and licensed ScrumMaster, Henrik brings sharp systems thinking—and a love of storytelling—to help teams grow and thrive. You can link with Henrik Mårtensson on LinkedIn and connect with Henrik Mårtensson on Twitter.

1520 WCHE AM
WCHE Morning Show 5 1 25

1520 WCHE AM

Play Episode Listen Later May 1, 2025 47:03


Emmy Award winning filmmaker Frederick Taylor joins the Morning Show to discuss his recent film The Third Country and his participation in a panel at the West Chester Film Festival last weekend.

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast
The Big Agile Questions for 2025: A Community Reflection With Your Submitted Questions

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 14, 2025 22:24


This is a special episode, where I introduce the "Big Agile Questions" survey and review some of the questions that you've already submitted! Thank you all who did! You can find the submission form here. Submit your questions, as we will be reviewing these in future episodes! To join 25,341 other Agilists on our Newsletter (˜1 post/week), visit this page, and join. The Power of Asking Better Questions At every major turning point in history, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, progress has begun with asking better questions. The Agile movement itself started with the authors of the Agile Manifesto questioning traditional software development methods. Now, in 2025, with significant changes in the industry including PMI's acquisition of the Agile Alliance, the community faces a crucial moment to shape its future direction through thoughtful inquiry and reflection. "Throughout history, the biggest leaps forward have come from people willing to ask difficult, sometimes even quite challenging, questions." The Future Beyond Agile

Business RadioX ® Network
Tanya Turner with Salto Systems and Frederick Taylor with Tomorrow Pictures

Business RadioX ® Network

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 16, 2025


Tanya Turner/Salto Systems Salto Systems is a leading global access solutions provider, part of the SALTO WECOSYSTEM. Salto develops pioneering facility access control, identity management, and electronic locking technology that ensures seamless, reliable, and secure experiences. Salto solutions are used in over 40,000 installations with 40 million daily users and has offices in 40 countries […]

Gwinnett Business Radio
Tanya Turner with Salto Systems and Frederick Taylor with Tomorrow Pictures

Gwinnett Business Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 16, 2025


Tanya Turner/Salto Systems Salto Systems is a leading global access solutions provider, part of the SALTO WECOSYSTEM. Salto develops pioneering facility access control, identity management, and electronic locking technology that ensures seamless, reliable, and secure experiences. Salto solutions are used in over 40,000 installations with 40 million daily users and has offices in 40 countries […] The post Tanya Turner with Salto Systems and Frederick Taylor with Tomorrow Pictures appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

The Innovation Show
Technological Taylorism: How Modern AI is Reshaping the Future of Work

The Innovation Show

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 13, 2024 10:57


  Technological Taylorism: How Modern AI is Reshaping the Future of Work In this episode, we delve into the concept of Technological Taylorism and how the advent of AI and automation is restructuring the workforce. We revisit Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management and examine their relevance in today's job market. The discussion covers the rise in workplace surveillance, the transformation of jobs into piecemeal tasks, and the increasing vulnerability of freelance and middle management roles. The episode also explores the larger implications of AI on job creation, economic growth, and the potential for a technological singularity. Featuring insights from experts like Paul Daugherty and Yossi Sheffi, this thought-provoking discussion questions the future of labor in an efficient, data-driven world. 00:00 Introduction: Technological Taylorism and the Future of Work 00:32 The Legacy of Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management 01:31 Modern Workforce Surveillance and AI 03:04 The Rise of Freelancers and Automation 05:39 Creative Destruction in the Digital Age 08:13 The Future of Work: Concerns and Predictions 10:24 Conclusion: Human + Machine Paradigm   Technological Taylorism: The Automation of Efficiency and the Future of Work The philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan contends that "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us", The idea suggests that we create and adapt to technologies. These technologies, in turn, shape our behaviours, perceptions, and ultimately, our societies. This goes for any technology from the stopwatch to the advanced artificial intelligence.  I hope I am wrong... In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Frederick Taylor introduced a management approach that would fundamentally change the industrial world. With tools as basic as a pen, ledger, and stopwatch, Taylor meticulously observed and recorded the activities of factory workers, aiming to enhance efficiency through what he termed "scientific management." This system dissected every action into its basic elements. Taylor's analysis led to the precise timing and reorganization of each task to maximize speed and efficiency. Initially, these changes led to significant productivity gains, but they also stripped workers of their autonomy and sense of craftsmanship. Understandably, Taylorism reduced skilled artisans to interchangeable cogs in a mechanized process. Fast forward to today, and Taylor's shadow looms large over modern workforce management. Today's management practices have evolved to slice jobs into ever-smaller tasks. In 2019, The Wall Street Journal highlighted a significant shift towards workplace surveillance, labelling employees as "workforce data generators." This marked a new phase in management's scientific approach, now armed with AI-driven tools far beyond Taylor's  stopwatch. The COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to remote work turbocharged the use of these surveillance tools. A 2021 study by Gartner revealed that the adoption of technologies like facial recognition among employers had doubled to 60% during the pandemic, with predictions of continued growth. This surge in monitoring tools reflects a crisis-induced rush towards greater control, reminiscent of Taylor's response to perceived inefficiencies. The narrative has been that a surefire way to protect yourself in an age of AI is to have a complex, human job. However, when you really examine any complex job it is just a Gordian knot of simple tasks, tasks that can be cheese sliced apart. Consider, AI-powered project management software that eliminates middle management by automating tasks. Once it has unbundled jobs into tasks, it then assembles freelance teams. While these freelancers initially benefit, the software soon learns from their work, and gradually replaces them too.  Freelancers are increasingly becoming a significant part of the workforce. A 2022 study by Upwork found that 38% of Americans engaged in...

Highlights from Talking History
The Fall Of The Berlin Wall

Highlights from Talking History

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 10, 2024 49:50


We're marking the 35th anniversary of one of the most seismic events of the 20th century: the fall of the Berlin Wall. We'll find out why it was built, how it fell, and how it brought an end to the Cold War.Joining Patrick Geoghegan is: Prof Patrick Major, Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading; Katja Hoyer, historian, author of ‘Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990', and visiting Research Fellow at King's College London; and Frederick Taylor, historian, author of ‘The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989' and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain.

TERRATYPIQUE
Les ressources humaines, aux origines des emmerdes !

TERRATYPIQUE

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2024 25:50


Les origines des ressources humaines remontent à la révolution industrielle, mais cette notion remonte à bien plus loin que cela, avec des origines controversées, y compris dans l'esclavagisme. L'évolution vers le concept de "ressources humaines" est un long processus qui a progressivement émergé au 20e siècle, influencée par des théories comme le taylorisme ( de Frederick Taylor) bien sûr, en passant par le Fordisme, et d'autres évolutions. Bien qu'efficace pour augmenter la production, cette approche a été depuis longtemps pointée du doigt pour sa déshumanisation du travail, mais pas seulement… On observe une tension entre la volonté affichée de bien-être des employés et la persistance de méthodes de gestion orientées sur la performance et le contrôle qui prennent leurs origines dans des évolutions productivistes et utilitaristes, sur fond de bouleversements historiques majeures. Bref, nous remontons l'histoire mouvementée d'un phénomène bien plus complexe qu'il n'y paraît et surtout dans la construction d'une pensée totalement en dehors du vivant et qui a réduit notre Terre en une simple mine de ressources exploitables, mais tragiquement épuisables, elle aussi, comme l'humain.

Agile and Project Management - DrunkenPM Radio
An interview with Jimi Fosdick of Fearless Agility

Agile and Project Management - DrunkenPM Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 31, 2024 44:24


Summary In this episode, Jimmy Fosdick joins Dave for a conversation about his journey from traditional project management to agile. They discuss the challenges of applying traditional project management to software development, the importance of understanding the context and problem domain when choosing project management approaches, and the misuse of the term 'agile' in the consulting industry. They also touch on the legacy of Frederick Taylor and the need for a people-centered approach in project management. The conversation explores the challenges of traditional project management and the need for a more empirical and agile approach. They discuss the problems with big upfront planning, the importance of shorter cycle times, and the fear of failure. The conversation also touches on the need for more humane workspaces and the changing nature of work. The principal themes include the limitations of traditional project management, the benefits of an empirical approach, and the evolving workforce and work environment. Takeaways • Traditional project management is effective for problems that can be solved on paper upfront, but may not work well for software development. • Agile approaches, such as Scrum, are better suited for software development and other complex, empirical problems. • The term 'agile' has become an overloaded and misused brand in the consulting industry. • Hybrid approaches that combine traditional project management and agile practices can be problematic and may not fully embrace the values and principles of agile. • A people-centered approach is essential in project management, and the focus should be on collaboration, respect, and solving the right problems. Traditional project management relies on upfront planning, which can lead to longer cycle times and higher failure rates. • An empirical approach, such as Agile, allows for shorter cycle times and the ability to adapt and change as needed. • The fear of failure often hinders organizations from embracing more agile and iterative approaches. • There is a growing emphasis on creating more humane workspaces and allowing for more flexibility and creativity in the workplace. • The nature of work is changing, and organizations need to adapt to the expectations and needs of the new generation of workers. Titles • The Misuse of the Term 'Agile' in the Consulting Industry • From Traditional Project Management to Agile: Jimmy Fosik's Journey The Changing Nature of Work • Overcoming the Fear of Failure Chapters 02:20 Introduction and Background 05:52 The Challenges of Traditional Project Management in Software Development 08:33 Differentiating Scrum from Traditional Project Management 12:13 The Misuse of the Term 'Agile' 14:38 The Problem with Hybrid Approaches 22:17 Legacy Code in Our Heads: Shifting the Project Management Paradigm 26:21 The Benefits of an Empirical Approach 28:46 Overcoming the Fear of Failure 33:18 Creating More Humane Workspaces 39:03 The Changing Nature of Work Contacting Jimi - Web: https://fearlessagility.com/ - X: https://x.com/FearlessAgility - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FearlessAgility/ - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realFearlessAgility/ - Courses on the Scrum Alliance site: https://tinyurl.com/yjc2rtmf Links from Dave's Intro - The Art of War for Collaboration Course http://modusinstitute.com/course/art-of-war-collaboration - Guided Personal Kanban (September 2024) http://modusinstitute.com/course/guided-pk-sep-usa The Agile Network* https://go.theagilenetwork.com/l/web-dprior Use the discount codes below to get either 20% or 2 months of free access 2 Free Months - DRUNKENPM10CM 20% off Annual - DRUNKENPM10C20 Contacting Dave Linktree: https://linktr.ee/mrsungo

Through The Garden Gate
Episode 51 : Sam Frederick Taylor ✌

Through The Garden Gate

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2024 94:09


Another career changing gardener learning their craft in the most inspiring place imaginable @belmondlemanoir Great chat with Sam such a passionate thoughtful gardener Highlights from the episode

The Leadership Podcast
TLP418: The Importance of Human Distinctiveness with Todd Rose

The Leadership Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 17, 2024 42:37


Todd Rose is the co-founder and CEO of  Populace, and founder of the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality. Todd is also a bestselling author of "Collective Illusions," "Dark Horse," and "The End of Average."  Todd explains how the abandonment of human distinctiveness during the industrial age has left a lasting impact on our potential and fulfillment. He emphasizes that true individuality is crucial for cultivating personal potential and living fulfilling lives.  He explores the tension between individualism and collectivism, asserting that individuality should not be mistaken for selfishness. He then shifts to the challenges leaders face in balancing fairness and personalization. Todd highlights the importance of autonomy in realizing individuality and cautions against the authoritarian potential of individuality without autonomy.  Todd expresses concerns about the potential for a divided education system where some students are trained as cogs in the machine while others are nurtured to develop their individuality and agency. Todd talks about his Dark Horse Project, which explores how people achieve fulfillment and excellence by following their unique paths.       Key Takeaways [03:30] Todd discussed why individuality is central to his work and the importance of human distinctiveness and its impact on potential and fulfillment. He also compared standardization to personalization in various fields.  [06:03] Todd emphasizes the impact of the Industrial Age on individuality, psychological drives for categorization versus self-expression, and a critique of Frederick Taylor's scientific management and its effects in relation to societal transformation, human identity, and labor efficiency during the industrial revolution. [07:28] He talks about the importance of personalizing leadership while maintaining fairness, the challenges of balancing individual needs with organizational goals, and the evolving expectations of employees in the workplace. [10:45] He discusses the transformation needed in education and workplace institutions, the shift from material abundance to psychological and spiritual fulfillment, and the role of leaders in navigating paradigm shifts and fostering individuality in the context of adapting to changing societal values and promoting holistic well-being in both educational and professional settings. [14:16] He shares the challenges of giving employees more autonomy while maintaining control, the comparison of bottom-up versus top-down approaches in leadership, and the importance of clear outcomes and flexible processes in modern workplaces in relation to fostering innovation, productivity, and employee satisfaction within organizational structures. [26:47] Todd gives an example of personalized health utilizing the glycemic index and machine learning. He also shares his personal experience with personalized nutrition, highlighting the potential of technology to scale personalization in various fields by leveraging data-driven approaches to optimize individual health outcomes and enhance personalized experiences across different domains. [35:32] He introduces his book “The Dark Horse project and book”, emphasizing the transformation of individuality into fulfillment and excellence. He also shares his personal anecdotes, highlighting the impact of the Dark Horse mindset on Todd's family and their journey towards embracing uniqueness and achieving personal success. [41:57] Closing quote: Remember, "If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything." - Claude McKay   Quotable Quotes "The biggest mistake we've made in the industrial age is the abandonment of the appreciation for human distinctiveness." "Harnessing your individuality is a pretty central element to really leading a fulfilling life." "The flaw with the industrial age is that in the past, it was sort of intuitive that we were categorized in the same way that we thought it was intuitive that the earth was flat." "Whereas like a Frederick Taylor, we led to a very paternalistic society that we've lived in for quite a while, which is in some ways antithetical to liberal democracies." "The biggest driver of a sense of meaning is pursuing a goal freely chosen." "It's very hard to transform institutions that are captured." "Innovation in terms of being left behind is really important." "We can get scale through personalization." "Individuality is a fact, and it's really important." "If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything." - Claude McKay   These are the books mentioned in our discussion with Todd   Resources Mentioned The Leadership Podcast | Sponsored by | Rafti Advisors. LLC | Self-Reliant Leadership. LLC | Todd Rose LinkedIn | Todd Rose Website | Todd Rose Twitter |  

The Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed
InfluenceWatch Podcast: Episode 321: The Environmentalist Billionaire You’ve Never Heard Of (#321)

The Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 14, 2024


You've heard of Mike Bloomberg; those longer in years might remember Tom Steyer; deep readers of Capital Research Center might remember Fred Stanback; the billionaire environmentalist donor is a repeating figure. But you've probably not heard of C. Frederick Taylor, a reclusive California billionaire who drives millions to the environmentalist movement. Joining us to discuss Taylor, […]

InfluenceWatch Podcast
Episode 321: The Environmentalist Billionaire You've Never Heard Of

InfluenceWatch Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 14, 2024 22:49


You've heard of Mike Bloomberg; those longer in years might remember Tom Steyer; deep readers of Capital Research Center might remember Fred Stanback; the billionaire environmentalist donor is a repeating figure. But you've probably not heard of C. Frederick Taylor, a reclusive California billionaire who drives millions to the environmentalist movement. Joining us to discuss Taylor, his Sequoia Climate Foundation, and the effect he's having on environmental policy is our Capital Research colleague Ken Braun. Links: The Sequoia Climate Foundation: The “Secretive U.S. Vulture Fund”The Sequoia Climate Foundation: Following Fred's MoneyThe Sequoia Climate Foundation: Funding of Anti-Energy RadicalsThe Sequoia Climate Foundation: Climate ColonialismThe Progressive International: MembersC. Frederick TaylorFollow us on our socials: Twitter: @capitalresearchInstagram: @capitalresearchcenterFacebook: www.facebook.com/capitalresearchcenterYouTube: @capitalresearchcenter

History Flakes - The Berlin History Podcast
Episode 1 - The November Revolution

History Flakes - The Berlin History Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2024 45:12


It's November in Germany, so you know that there's History afoot. Join Jonny Whitlam and Pip Roper as we discuss some of the context leading up to the November Revolution, (29th October-9th November) and try to detangle the confusion of those in the thick of it. Kaiser Wilhelm II doesn't know when to leave the party, Rosa Luxemburg's fresh out of prison and she told you this war was a bad idea all along, and there's a town full of sailor's who aren't that keen on pointlessly dying actually. Join us as we, and they, try to navigate a forced abdication, end of an Empire and beginning of a whole new and turbulent world. You can can in touch and book Jonny or Pip for a tour of Berlin via www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com. Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffithshttps://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/Sources:'The Weimar Years' by Frank McDonough'The Downfall of Money' by Frederick Taylor

Well That Aged Well
Episode 172: The Berlin Wall. With Frederick Taylor

Well That Aged Well

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2024 128:18


THIS WEEK! We take a look at The Berlin Wall. From the Soviet Invation in 1945 To Soviet Western relations. To the escapees to the west, and the building of The Berlin Wall. And what was it like to live in the East German Regime during The Cold War, and what was the aftermath of the collapse to a transition from Comunism to Capitalism for the Eastern Germans like? Find Out This Week On "Well That Aged Well", with "Erlend HedegartSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/well-that-aged-well. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

MTD Audiobook
Cutting the chatter

MTD Audiobook

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 26, 2024 10:15


Productive Machines is on a mission to provide a 15-minute turnaround from receiving data on its cloud-based, artificial intelligence platform to delivering a click-and-play machining protocol that enables manufacturers to machine the best part, faster, first time. John Yates talks to the spin-out team whose software-as-a-service is driving step changes in productivity and sustainability. Walking along the second-floor corridor to the Productive Machines' workspace in the AMP Technology Centre, Rotherham, Dr Erdem Ozturk stops to look through the window at the Rolls-Royce Factory of the Future, whose 3,000sq/m of machining workshops were his research and development laboratory for more than a decade. Erdem led the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre's brilliant Machining Dynamics Technology Group, which grew in the innovation environment enabled by Dr Sam Turner and AMRC co-founder Professor Keith Ridgway which propelled the Factory of the Future to global leader in aerospace milling. Their success was achieved by adapting and refining the fiendishly complex mathematical models of machining research pioneers like Franz Koenigsberger and Jiri Tlusty whose ideas were turned into game-changing operational manufacturing methods by their former students, and now professors in their own right, Yusuf Altintas, Scott Smith and Tom Delio. Perhaps the AMRC's biggest success came in 2014 when they applied these theoretical models to vibration control, cutting tool design, and residual stress management in a SAMULET project that was to revolutionise the manufacturing of Rolls-Royce aero-engine discs and shaft components.  The improvements in quality, alongside the time and cost savings achieved in the manufacture of the fan disc, have become folklore in the AMRC and the close-knit aerospace manufacturing community: a 50% reduction in cycle times and right-first-time production rates rising from 85% to over 99%. Coupled with cost-savings of £135m, this made UK jet engine production globally competitive, safeguarding 400 high-value-added jobs and unlocking a £300m investment in a North East plant. Not content with this success, Erdem and his AMRC team, along with European partners, began harnessing the power of information technology to push the boundaries of the possible, creating state-of-the-art digital twins that combined machine tool dynamics, control loops, tool-path generation and machining processes, to boost productivity, extend tool life and eliminate chatter. Productive Machines traces its lineage back to this remarkable pedigree. Formed in 2021, shortly before joining an elite group of start-ups on the ATI Boeing Accelerator programme – over 200 applicants from 44 countries were whittled down to just ten – the business was explicit from the start in its mission to maximise the productivity and sustainability of machine tools.  “We are using our unique digital twin to simulate millions of combinations of machine settings to arrive at the optimum feed rate and spindle speed settings for a given process before manufacturing. This eliminates chatter vibrations and provides machining optimisation, preventative maintenance and part quality that may not be achieved by a human operator even with years of continuous improvement,” says Erdem, who now leads a growing international team of machining physics developers and software engineers from their base in the heart of South Yorkshire's Advanced Manufacturing Innovation District. Having raised a cumulative £3m investment, the company launched its Feed Rate Calculator and Spindle Speed Calculator apps in October and November last year respectively. This was followed by an early access programme for a predictive maintenance service for spindle health monitoring in December.  In the next few months, they will be launching the fully automated cloud based system that achieves a 15-minute turnaround from receiving data on its artificial intelligence platform to delivering a click-and-play machining protocol that enables manufacturers to machine the best part, faster, first time. “We saw there was a massive opportunity to turn our cutting-edge technology into a simple, straightforward Software as a Service (SaaS) product,” Erdem adds. “Using artificial intelligence and digital twins of the milling process, we can identify vibration-free parameters and automatically personalise the process to eliminate chatter. This opens up a future where cutting optimisation technology is accessible to all, regardless of the scale of operation” One early client, Yorkshire headquartered Ficep UK, a leading supplier of structural steel and plate fabrication machine tools, has seen process productivity increase by 110%, with cycle times cut by 53% while reducing the magnitude of vibrations five times. Other clients report reductions in machining design and set-up times of 20%; cycle times reduced between ten to more than 50%; operational and maintenance costs cut by 25%; and cutting tool costs reduced by 11%  An additional benefit of this software-as-a-service is the way it can dramatically reduce manufacturers' carbon footprint. “By finally solving the age-old and frustrating problem of machine tool chatter, we calculate that our technology could save a staggering 2.5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions between now and 2050,” Erdem says. To put this into perspective, 2.5 gigatonnes is equivalent to the UK's total carbon emissions - every factory, fire, car, flight and light - for six years. While work continues in developing and refining the AI platform for launch in the spring, it's fascinating to learn that an essential piece of kit in this operation is one of the oldest in the toolbox: the tap test. Used in aerospace engineering since the 1950s, the tap test relies on simple physics: the kinetic impulse of a hammer strike dissipated as vibration and sound.  However, where traditional tap testing relied on skilled individuals to interpret the sounds made by the struck object, such as a machine tool, today's digital tap tests are much more sophisticated and precise. Instead of transmitting vibration responses to the ear as an acoustic sound wave, a digital tap hammer sends the vibration response as data to a computer for recording and analysis. Specialist software then calculates the precise frequency response from those vibrations, considering parameters like the frequency, amplitude, and decay rate of the vibrations, and enables an exact analysis of that tool's unique characteristics and condition.  From its origins, the age-old practice of tap testing has not only endured but has evolved into an even more powerful tool in the era of smart manufacturing, becoming a critical component of quality control, material characterisation, structural health monitoring. “Digital tap testing, enhanced by AI, is ushering in a new era of precision and efficiency in manufacturing. It empowers manufacturers to optimise machine tool performance, reduce waste, and enhance product quality. It is democratising condition-monitoring and predictive maintenance, enabling even small-scale operators to benefit from data-driven technologies without costly investments in sensors or infrastructure,” Erdem added. Although focused on the future, Erdem is also a keen student of machining history and one of his go-to authors is the American Quaker Frederick Taylor, best known for bringing the ‘scientific method' to the early factory system making it more efficient and productive.  Taylor also wrote a book On the Art of Cutting Metals, published in 1907, which identified “chatter as the most obscure and delicate of all problems facing the machinist – probably no rules or formulae can be devised which will accurately guide the machinist in taking maximum cuts and speeds possible without producing chatter.” Erdem smiles and says Taylor was absolutely right. “There were no formulae available to predict chatter vibrations until 1954 when Tlusty was able to formulate the absolute stability limit for chip width for turning operations. That meant if the process planner selected a chip width smaller than this limit, the process would be stable and there would not be chatter vibrations irrespective of the spindle speed used.” Seventy years on since the formulation of Tlusty's law for the identification of chatter stability lobes in turning processes, the Productive Machines team are coming very close to proving Frederick Taylor wrong by accurately guiding the machinist in making maximum cuts and speeds possible without producing chatter for machining processes.  That, I suspect, matters as much to this team as turning a profit.  It would certainly delight Keith Ridgway: “If I were starting the AMRC today, it would not be by constructing a huge machining research facility. It would be by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, cloud-based data analytics and digital twins. Product

Srsly Wrong
303 – (TEASER) Taylorism

Srsly Wrong

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 23, 2024 9:09


Wrong Boys discuss the soulless hierarchal theories of Frederick Taylor and his influence on evolution of the workplace. full episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/303-taylorism-96698428 Theme Song by alman the man:https://open.spotify.com/artist/0phmPAQKm91ez7HJPTUEZ1

The Management Theory Toolbox
Episode 3: Navigating Complexity with Dr. Harold Langlois

The Management Theory Toolbox

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2024 28:16 Transcription Available


Experience the transformation of leadership and management with us as we trace the lineage of these concepts from the divine right of kings to the nuanced interplay of today's corporate strategies. With the guidance of time-traveler George and insights from Dr. Harold Langlois, we dissect the evolution of command and control, scrutinizing the legacy of figures like Frederick Taylor and the impact of scientific management on our modern workplace. Delve into the fabric of management theory and unearth the significance of adapting to the living organisms that are our organizations, beyond just solving problems with pre-packaged solutions.We challenge the very notion of control, and question if the traditional hierarchy still serves us in a world that resembles a jazz ensemble more than a rigid orchestra. The shift from certainty to adaptability is at the core of our discussion, encouraging leaders to embrace the unexpected with the same finesse as improvisational musicians. Join us as we reimagine leadership not as a solitary command but as a collective symphony, where every member plays a critical role in harmonizing the complexities of today's dynamic business environment.Harold Langlois [Guest] has been working with decision makers in the financial sector for 25 years. As a professor teaching management at Harvard University, Division of Continuing Education, Harold continues to inspire graduate students in the areas of Change, Leadership, and Team Challenges, and in 2002 was the recipient of the Joanne Fussa Award for Outstanding Teaching. Known for his dynamic and motivating presentations, Harold has been a featured speaker at national and international conferences, and is recognized as a thought leader utilizing research on neurobiology, leadership, and communication to enhance skill sets for today's decision makers. Travis C. Mallett [Host],  is  a Masters of Liberal Arts (ALM) candidate at Harvard University Extension School, where he has also earned Professional Graduate Certificates in both Organizational Behavior and Strategic Management. Travis previously received undergraduate degrees in Electrical Engineering, General Mathematics, and Music from Washington State University. He also served as an Engineering Manager at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, where he led a team responsible for developing and maintaining SEL's highest-selling product line. An innovative force in engineering, Travis holds numerous patents and has authored papers and books across diverse subjects. His passion for continuous learning and organizational excellence propels him to explore and illuminate the intricacies of management theories. Through his podcast, "The Management Theory Toolbox", he offers valuable insights on effective leadership, business innovation, and strategic methodologies.Want to dive in even deeper? Visit the full show notes for this episode.

Embracing Differences
Technique and Efficiency – Ideologies we live by

Embracing Differences

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 27, 2023 38:42


Our society has become so obsessed with measurement that even leisure, reading, wellbeing and healthy living have become a topic for efficiency. Many of us live and die without experiencing a life outside of efficiency and measurement. Take for instance the case of the father of scientific management Frederick Taylor. Even on his deathbed, Taylor was seen winding a stopwatch. What a paradox that we won't let go of measurement even when there is no time left to live?   But things are not that straightforward. How do we explain the countless time sitting on the couch browsing through social media without purpose or meaning? How do we explain investments in weapons of mass destruction? Clearly these are issues that cannot always be understood through the lenses of efficiency. In this podcast, Rob Long and I discuss the meaning of Technique as an ideology (or a worldview) that has come to dominate our lives. The ideology of Technique comes from the work of the French philosopher Jacques Ellul but was also discussed in the work of Heidegger and other philosophers.   We hope this podcast will make you think, reflect and live a more fulfilling life.

Tactical Leadership
BATL Confidence w/ Frederick Taylor

Tactical Leadership

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 12, 2023 53:41


"Fashion is the only venue that we have that is sort of resilient to … these other types of agendas that orbit around us in society ... you can do anything and you can do everything and you can be exactly who you want." - Frederick Taylor In this episode of the Tactical Leader Podcast, host KC Sullivan has an engaging conversation with Emmy award winning filmmaker Frederick Taylor about how fashion, film and pop culture shape our self-image and culture. They discuss the power of authentic self-expression through style and using clothes to intentionally project confidence. Frederick shares how fashion allows people to belong and feel represented. If you want to learn more about how fashion and film have shaped our culture, and how we can use this to improve our self-confidence, this is the episode for you![00:00 - 04:08] Frederick's BackgroundGrew up protecting others, believing in equityRealized the industry he was in didn't align with his desire to create impactful work[04:09 - 17:58] Being Yourself and Using Fashion to Build IdentityDon't get caught chasing superficial goalsFocus on believing in your abilities and serving othersFashion builds identity and pathways to become your best selfIt helps you belong and feel empowered[17:59 - 38:21] Intentional Style and Diverse RepresentationStyle is how you utilize fashionBe intentional about the message your style projectsBenetton's diverse ads were groundbreakingRepresentation matters[38:22 - 53:07] Enjoying Self-Expression and Teaching Next GenerationsEnjoy and document your fashion journeyTrends fade, but self-belief lastsTeach youth when self-expression needs to align with appropriatenessGuide them to stay grounded in themselvesKey Quotes:"When you … fall on your face, you make mistakes … you have your scrapes, that's okay. You're not in this game to try to be perfect. You're in this game to try to be you." - Frederick Taylor Connect with Frederick Taylor:Instagram: @fr3der1ckDid you love the value that we are putting out in the show?LEAVE A REVIEW and tell us what you think about the episode so we can continue putting out great content just for you!Share this episode and help someone who wants to expand their leadership capacity or click here to listen to our previous episodes.The Tactical Leader is powered by Advancing the Line for Veterans, a 501c3 supporting veteran entrepreneurship. If you or someone you know is passionate about supporting the veteran community, please head over to ATLVets.org and get involved!If you want to learn how to build a better business, you can connect with me at ZackAKnight.com. You can connect with us on LinkedIn, Instagram, or join Our BATL Space and become part of the community.

Machthunger
Frankreich – Wie Adel und Bürgertum Kochkunst und Restaurant erschufen

Machthunger

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2023 28:43


„Wer in einem Park Bäume wie Truppen anordnen kann, schneidet auch ein Fischfilet in ein Quadrat.“Gastrosoph Peter Peter übt hier nur scheinbar Kritik an der französischen Küche. In Wahrheit gilt Frankreich – was die Küche betrifft – seine größte Bewunderung. Frankreich habe einen künstlerischen Zugang zum Essen, erklärt er und keine andere Küche bringe so viel Geduld und Respekt für das Essen auf wie die französische. Welche kulinarische Tradition sonst kennt den Begriff des Affinierens, des Reifenlassens bis zur Vollendung?macht Hunger ist der neue Podcast von Der Pragmaticus. Sie finden uns auch auf Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn und X (Twitter). In dieser Episode führen Peter Peter und Karin Pollack Sie zurück zu den Ursprüngen der französischen Küche, nach Versailles, wo die Langeweile des Adels am Hof die aufwändigsten Gerichte erschuf, und in das Paris der Bourgeoisie, der Kleinbürger und der Handwerker mit den Restaurants, den Bistros und der Traditions des Essengehens. Frankreich hat so nicht nur das Restaurant erfunden, sondern auch die Weltsprache der Küchen, der Essenszubereitung – von der Sauce über das Blanchieren bis zum Sorbet, die Sprache des Kochens ist französisch. In Frankreich hat auch die Küchen- und Restauranthierarchie ihren Ursprung: Vom Chef de Cuisine über den Sous Chef bis zum Chef de Partie – ein französisches Restaurant hat eine strenge Arbeitsteilung und möglicherweise haben sowohl Frederick Taylor als auch Henry Ford den Küchen von Versailles und den ersten Restaurants viel zu verdanken.Dies ist die zweite Folge unseres Podcast macht Hunger mit dem Gastrosophen Peter Peter. In unserer Podcastreihe macht Hunger geht es um die Kulturgeschichte des Essens und alle wirtschaftlichen Verstrickungen und politischen Machtspiele, die mit dem Essen und kulinarischen Traditionen verbunden sind.Die erste Folge über die Macht der Nationalgerichte können Sie hier nachhören, das weitere Programm von macht Hunger finden Sie hier:macht Hunger – Ihr Programm bis Mitte November 3. Oktober >> Regionalismus lokal – Der Luxus von Cucina Povera: Der italienische Filmregisseur Pier Paolo Pasolini meinte, der Konsumismus werde den Arbeiter umbringen. Sicher bringt der Konsumismus im Gewand des Fast Food die Cucina Povera, die einfache Küche, um. Sie wird Luxus, jede regionale Besonderheit wird eingeebnet.17. Oktober >> Urheberstreit – Wer hat das Patent auf Schnitzel? In Deutschland war das Wiener Schnitzel einst (also circa in den 1970er Jahren bis zum Ende der Sowjetunion) ein Synonym für gutbürgerliche Küche, und es machte nichts, eine Bratensoße darüber zu schütten. Insofern ist es nicht verwunderlich, dass Österreich das Gericht, dessen Form auch die des Landes ist, als sein Kulturgut zu schützen versucht. Dabei ist das Schnitzel eigentlich ein italienisches Gericht. Oder nicht?31. Oktober >> Essen global – Die Internationalisierung des Gaumens: „Der Grieche“ und „Der Italiener“ sind „um's Eck“, man geht auch „zum Chinesen“. Kein Tatort kommt ohne die Nachdenkpause in der Pommesbude aus, dabei gab es Pommes – die guten! – einst nur in Brüssel. Die Gaumenfreuden sind – Migration sei Dank – in Westeuropa internationaler geworden. Zugleich erlebt die Welt eine bedauerliche Standardisierung des Essens. 14. November >> Zucker, Zucker, Zucker: Oh Du süße Inflation: Zucker, tja, kann auch ganze Wirtschaften aufblähen und Spekulationsblasen erzeugen. Aktuell ist Zucker in Europa um 70 Prozent teurer als noch vor einem Jahr. Diese Folge von macht Hunger widmet sich der Wirtschaftsmacht der Lebensmittel.

This Meeting Sucks
S2E10: Debrief Meetings

This Meeting Sucks

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 5, 2023 11:09


You don't need a three-day offsite in the woods to improve your team's performance. It's much easier (and more effective) to bake debrief meetings into your team meeting rhythms so you can learn and grow from setbacks and successes. This episode covers an easy process you can use to start building a learning team.

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
528: Seth Godin - A New Manifesto For Teams: Innovation, Creativity, Hiring, Firing, & The Power of Speed (The Song of Significance)

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2023 52:56


Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." Join 10's of thousands of your fellow learning leaders and receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12   https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Seth Godin is the author of 20 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about marketing, leadership, and work. His blog (which you can find by typing "seth" into Google) is the most viewed marketing blog in the world. Some of my favorite books of his are… Tribes, Linchpin, Purple Cow, and most recently The Song of Significance. Notes: Hiring Leaders — when deciding who to hire for a leadership role: look at the careers of the people who have worked for them. And look at the careers of the people they've led. Leaders aren't managers with fancy titles. Leaders are planting the seeds for generations of impact to come. Let's get real or let's not play. Tension is what we seek. It's important to show up early. Frederick Taylor met Henry Ford and management was created. Study bees - They leave their home and have 72 hours to find their next one. Matt Mullenweg (Automatic CEO) - "Create the conditions for forward motion." To create the environment for the people they're leading to flourish. How are you intentionally creating the environment for the people you're leading to do their best work? Management doesn't just exist. It was invented. When you race to the bottom, You see people as resources, not as people. (I don't like the term human capital management) When Paul Orfalea was building kinkos (which he later sold to fed ex for $2B), he said his best technique for growing the business was simple. He would walk into their stores and ask someone there to tell him about an innovation they've recently made. And then he'd tell all the other stores about it… “Real value is no longer created by traditional measures of productivity. It's created by personal interactions, innovation, creative solutions, resilience, and the power of speed.”

Tall And True Short Reads
Two Visits to the Berlin Wall - Part One

Tall And True Short Reads

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 3, 2023 15:30


In 2019, approaching the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found a timely book in a secondhand bookshop: The Berlin Wall, 13 August 1961 – 9 November 1989 by Frederick Taylor. The book inspired me to write about my two contrasting visits to Berlin as a backpacker in 1987 and 1995.Two Visits to the Berlin Wall is a travel memoir from the Tall And True writers' website, written and narrated by Robert Fairhead.Read the piece on Tall And True: https://www.tallandtrue.com.au/nonfiction/travel/two-visits-to-the-berlin-wallPodcast website: https://www.tallandtrueshortreads.comSupport the podcast: https://supporter.acast.com/tall-and-true-short-readsBuy Robert's short story collections online:• Amazon Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Fairhead/e/B086HZ36NM• Rakuten Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/au/en/author/robert-fairheadPodcast Theme and Sound EffectsRoyalty-free music from Pixabay.com: Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 15 in D major, Op. 28 'Pastorale' – IV. Rondo. Allegro ma non-Troppo, performed by Karine Gilanyan.Sound effects licensed under Creative Commons 0 from FreeSound.org:• Shop Bell: https://freesound.org/people/775noise/sounds/494565/• Gunfire: https://freesound.org/people/C-V/sounds/523404/• Ping Sound: https://freesound.org/people/edsward/sounds/341871/• Plane: https://freesound.org/people/bigpickle51/sounds/262753/• Clock Ticking: https://freesound.org/people/Julien%20Matthey/sounds/457651/• Van Horn: https://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/479995/• City Ambience (Cologne): https://freesound.org/people/Pfannkuchn/sounds/384353/• Siren: https://freesound.org/people/lluiset7/sounds/367442/ Production NotesTall And True Short Reads is produced using Audacity. Episodes are recorded in Sydney, Australia, on the traditional lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation.Acast Podcast Supporter PageSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/tall-and-true-short-reads. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Augmented - the industry 4.0 podcast
Episode 106: Post Lean with Frode Odegaard

Augmented - the industry 4.0 podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2023 43:56


Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is "Post Lean." Our guest is Frode Odegaard, Chairman and CEO at the Post-Industrial Institute (https://post-industrial.institute/). In this conversation, we talk about the post-industrial enterprise going beyond digital and higher-order organizations. If you like this show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/). If you like this episode, you might also like Episode 102 on Lean Manufacturing with Michel Baudin (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/102). Augmented is a podcast for industry leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim (https://trondundheim.com/) and presented by Tulip (https://tulip.co/). Follow the podcast on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AugmentedPod) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/75424477/). Trond's Takeaway: Lean is a fundamental perspective on human organizations, but clearly, there were things not foreseen in the lean paradigm, both in terms of human and in terms of machine behavior. What are those things? How do they evolve? We have to start speculating now; otherwise, we will be unprepared for the future. One of the true questions is job stability. Will the assumptions made by early factory jobs ever become true again? And if not, how do you retain motivation in a workforce that's transient? Will future organizational forms perfect this task? Transcript: TROND: Welcome to another episode of the Augmented Podcast. Augmented brings industrial conversations that matter, serving up the most relevant conversations on industrial tech. Our vision is a world where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is Post Lean. Our guest is Frode Odegard, Chairman and CEO at the Post-Industrial Institute. In this conversation, we talk about the post-industrial enterprise going beyond digital and higher-order organizations. Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, process engineers, and for shop floor operators hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim and presented by Tulip. Frode, welcome to Augmented. How are you? FRODE: Pretty good. TROND: Yeah. Well, look, talking to Norwegians living abroad that's become a sport of mine. You were born in Norway, software design from there, became an entrepreneur, moved to Silicon Valley. I also know you have an Aikido black belt; we talked about this. This could have become its own podcast, right? There's a long story here. FRODE: [laughs] Absolutely, yeah. TROND: But you're also the CEO of the Post-Industrial Institute, which I guess used to be called the Post-Lean Institute. But in any case, there's a big connection here to lean, which is a global community for leaders that are driving transition towards something post-lean, post-industrial, post-something. So with that context, tell me a little about your background and how you ended up doing what you're doing. FRODE: Born in Norway, as you pointed out. My folks had a process control company, so that was kind of the industry I was born into was industrial controls, which included visiting factories as a child and installing process control systems. So I was doing, you know, circuit board assembly at age eight because when you grow up in a family business, that's what you get to do. And I quickly gravitated towards software. I think I was 13 when I was working on my first compiler. So my first passion was really programming and language, design, implementation, and that sort of got me interested in theoretical computer science. So very far from what I do today, in some ways, but I think theoretical computer science, especially as a software architecture and all that, teaches you how to think and sort of connect the dots, and that's a good life skill. At 17, I started a software company in high school. And when I was 22, I immigrated to the United States after some trips here. I was on a Standards Committee. I was on the Sun User Group board of directors as a European representative. It was a weird story in itself, how that happened. So yeah, 1990, 1991, I'm in Silicon Valley. TROND: So you jumped ship, essentially. Because, I mean, I've heard a lot of people who come to the U.S. and are inspired, but you just basically jumped off the airplane. FRODE: Yeah, I like to say I was here as an entrepreneurial refugee. Things are different now in Norway, but for a long time, they had strange taxation rules, and very difficult to start companies and scale them. But also, they didn't really have the fancy French word. They didn't really have the milieu. They didn't have a community of people trying to build companies in tech. So tech was very much focused on either military applications, that was its own little industry and community, or the energy industry, the oil industry in particular. TROND: All of that seems to have changed quite a bit. I mean, not that you or I, I guess, are experts on that. As ex-pats, we're outside, so we're looking in, which is a whole other story, I guess. But I'm curious about one more thing in your background so Aikido, which, to me, is endlessly fascinating, perhaps because I only ever attended one Aikido training and, for some reason, decided I wasn't going to do it that year, and then I didn't get back to it. But the little I understand of Aikido it has this very interesting principle of using the opponent's force instead of attacking. That's at least what some people conceptualize around it. But you told me something different. You said there are several schools of Aikido, and one of them is slightly more aggressive, and you belong to that school. I found that quite interesting. FRODE: [laughs] Now I'm wondering about my own depiction of this, but the Aikido that I study is known as Iwama-style Aikido, and it's called that because there was an old town in Japan, which has been absorbed by a neighboring city now, but it was called Iwama, and that's where the founder of Aikido moved during the Second World War, and that's where he sort of completed the art. And that's a long technical story, but he included a fairly large weapons curriculum as well. So it's not just unarmed techniques; it's sword-knife stuff. And it's a really beautiful art in that all of the movements with or without weapons are the same, like, they will follow the same principles. In terms of not attacking, of course, on a philosophical level, it calls itself the art of peace. In a practical sense, you can use it offensively to, for example, if you have someone who is grabbing your child or something like that, this person is not attacking you, but you have to step in and address the situation, and you can use it offensively for sure. TROND: Very interesting. I was going to jump straight to what you're up to now, then, which is, I guess, charting this path towards a different kind of industrial enterprise. And you said that you earlier called your efforts post-lean, and now you're calling them post-industrial. It's this continuity in industry, Frode. Tell me a little bit more about that. FRODE: I think a good way to think about approaches to management and understanding the world around us is that various management practices, and philosophies, and ideas, and so on, have been developed in response to circumstances that were there at the time. So if you think about Frederick Taylor and the problems that he was trying to solve, they initially had a lot to do with just getting work organized and standardized. And then, in 1930s, you start seeing the use of statistical methods. Then you start seeing more of an interest in the psychology of work and so on. And lean kind of melts all of these things together. A great contribution from Toyota is you have a socio-technical system and organizational design where you have a new kind of culture that emphasizes continuous learning, continuous problem solving using some of these ideas and tools that were developed much earlier. Now, in the post-war years, what we see is information technology making business more scalable, also contributing to complexity, but certainly making large companies more scalable than they would have been otherwise. And what we see in the mid-1990s leading up to the mid-2000s is the commercial internet, and then we get smartphones. That's the beginning of a new kind of industrial landscape. And what we see then is instead of an increasing tendency towards centralization in firms and business models, you start seeing this decoupling and decentralization. And what I discovered was that's actually a new thing for the human species. Ever since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago and then cities in the Bronze Age a little over 5,000 years ago, and then the industrial revolutions, we've seen a culmination of improved mastery of the world, adapting the world to our needs, which is technology and increasing centralization. You had to move to where the work was, and now we're sort of coming out of the pandemic (Let's hope it doesn't come back.) that has accelerated in the pandemic, so you have this decentralization, decoupling. And this continuity and the way I started using the term post-lean, and we can jump back and forth as you'd like, it was just because a lot of the assumptions behind the lean practices and how those practices were implemented were based on the idea that you had organizations that lasted a long time. You had long employee tenures. You had a certain kind of a...I don't like this term, but a social contract between the firm and workers and managers and workers. And they would come and do their work on-site in person at the factory, and this world is kind of disappearing now. And so there's all of this work now being done. I think manufacturing labor forces peaked at a third of the workforce some decades ago. But now it's down to about 11%, even though manufacturing as a share of the economy has remained fairly constant since the 1940s. It's gotten more productive. So there are also all these new jobs that have been created with people doing different kinds of work, and much of that work is knowledge work. And a lot of these industrial-era management practices and ideas have to be changed for knowledge work. And so that was sort of my initial discovery. That happened in the early 2000s. I started a company in 2004, which was called initially Lean Software Institute. I wanted to basically take these ideas and adapt them to software development. And that was generalized for knowledge work in general. And because we have big clients like Lockheed Martin in the aerospace defense sector, we rebranded the company to the Lean Systems Institute. And so for ten years, myself and a small team, we did organizational redesign work looking at not just workflow but also a bunch of these other factors, which we can talk about, that you have to take into consideration like knowledge management and so on. And then it was about 2014, 2015, when I discovered, hey, even though we kind of extended lean to look at all these other things, there's this decentralization happening. And maybe we should fundamentally revisit what firms should look like and how the external landscape outside the organization changes the way we think about designing companies. TROND: Yeah. I found it interesting, obviously, that you started from the software angle. And you told me earlier that, in some ways, your kind of Lean efforts are almost in parallel to, I guess, what could be called the lean movement, although there's such a variety of lean practitioners out there. They're obviously not all in the manufacturing industry. That's the whole point. Toyota managed to inspire a whole host of other companies that had nothing to do with automotive and nothing to do even with any kind of basic manufacturing. And I guess the software industry is no different; you know, the industry as such was inspired by it. And as you said, Lockheed Martin, and perhaps not only for their manufacturing side, were inspired by it when running their software or other types of maybe even office-based knowledge work. So as you're coming to these realizations, what sorts of things is it that you then start to think about that are the same and that are different in terms of the classic assumptions of lean, as you know, reducing waste or improving a process in a specific way with all the assumptions, so stable labor force like you said. FRODE: In that initial period from 2004 to 2014, that's when I really worked on adapting lean to knowledge work. And so you could see some people were trying to reduce knowledge work to kind of a simplified version of itself. They were trying...and so I call that the reductionist approach where they then could count documents as inventory, and they could have a Kanban system and all of that. And the agile movement in software became very enthused about doing just that. And I think what we did was we went the opposite route, so we took an expansionist approach. So we said, well, we got to keep adding practices and models to the original lean to deal with not just the value stream architecture of an organization but also its structure, so organization architecture, how it manages information, and the shape of that information, where it's stored, and how it's designed. And it's also that's information architecture. And, of course, what we know from wonderful people like Melvin Conway, who discovered that there's a direct relationship between your technology architecture and the shape of the organization, is we really need to also take into consideration what we then called product architecture. Because if your product architecture, and your organization architecture, and your workflow, your value stream architecture is mismatched in product development as well as in manufacturing, that leads to huge misalignment. And that's a cause of massive inventory problems and so on. And then the last of the five dimensions that we have in this model, which we call the lean systems framework, was a way to look at an organization's culture. So there are values that you explicitly promote, so we call them the organizational ideals. And then you have the actual behaviors that don't always live up to the ideals. And then you have people's beliefs about the past, the present, and the future, so we call all of that social architecture. And I think the last bit of work we did in this model, which is a pretty rich model or a metamodel of organizations, is we added the way to look at leadership styles and leadership effectiveness as a function of character and competence of perceived effectiveness. So this was used in a bunch of mostly large organizations over a period of 10 years, and Lockheed was able to get a 72, 73 production in lead time, largest subcontractor in the Future Combat Systems. I think that's the biggest defense project in the history of the United States. [laughs] It was canceled by Congress in the end, but yeah, they got some great results. And a lot of that was because workflow bottlenecks were caused by these other problems in these other four dimensions that had to be addressed, so that was kind of our initial realization. And then there's that big break where we look at decentralization, and how is that causing us to revisit the assumptions about organizational design? So it's not like we get new dimensions of organizational design as much as starting to think about what's the ideal design. And those answers turn out to be very different than they have been up till now. TROND: So that's interesting. So both...you were kind of discovering some...maybe not weaknesses, just, you know, some social change that was happening that is affecting organizations nowadays, you know, in America or anywhere else trying to implement lean principles. But also, what you were saying about the agile movement and what's happening in software industrial organizations that it doesn't reflect what needs to be happening in industries across the board and perhaps not even in their own organizations because it is, I guess, if I paraphrase you a little bit, the agile principles they are very valid for achieving a very smooth software development process. But they're not so valid for a lot of other aspects having to do with social and organizational phenomena that you also need to take into account eventually. So, I mean, if that's correct, it's interesting, right? Because everybody obviously focuses on what they are doing. So the agilists, I guess, they're optimizing a software development process. The lean folks, the classic lean folks, are optimizing a production line. But today's knowledge work is, I guess, over these years also, Frode, it has changed a bit. FRODE: It has changed, and there is more machine systems, software systems. We have more tools, although we're still in the early stages of what's going to come with the use of AI to make knowledge work more productive and so on. But I think one thing that's important, because I don't want to throw anyone under the bus here, is practitioners. There's a lot to be learned from practitioners. Often, they're kind of apologetic, "Oh, I'm not doing the pure X, Y, Z method. We have to adapt it a little bit." Well, guess what? That's what Toyota did. And so what happened is a lot of western companies they were just trying to copy what Toyota did without understanding why those things work there. And it's when you can adopt it, so that's also sort of martial arts. -- TROND: That's actually a fantastic point, Frode, because if you're very, very diehard lean, some people would say, "Well, lean is whatever Toyota does." But on the other hand, for Toyota, lean is whatever Toyota does, right? And it seems to have worked for them. That does not even mean that Toyota would tell you to do exactly what they are doing because they will tell you what makes sense for your organization. In a nutshell, that seems to be – FRODE: And I was there. I mean, I was, you know, I remember one time I was really thinking about standardizing work. And I was reading about the history of all this and reading about Frederick Taylor and the very early days of all of this. And I was coming up with a checklist for housework. I was trying to implement standard work for housework. And guess what? It didn't really work. My girlfriend was upset. [laughter] TROND: Implementing standards for housework. I like it. FRODE: Yeah. I mean, if you see something that needs to be cleaned, just clean it. I was like, "No, no, we need a checklist. We need your exit and entry conditions." [laughter] TROND: You should work at ISS, you know, the big cleaning professionals company. FRODE: There you go. And people have done that, right? But I like to tell this joke about how do you know the difference between a terrorist and a methodologist? And the answer is you can negotiate with a terrorist. TROND: Yeah, that's right. FRODE: So the methodologist believes that his or her methodology is the answer to all things. And so what we were trying to do with the Lean Systems Framework was not to say, "Ah, you know, all this lean stuff is invalid." We were trying to say, "Well, the methods that they had and the practices that they had that were available to us via the literature...because we never went to visit Toyota. We talked to a bunch of companies that were doing a lot of these things, and we were familiar with the literature. But we realized there's a whole bunch of other things that are not being addressed, so we have to add those. And that's why I called it the expansionist approach as opposed to the folks taking the reductionist approach, which is we have to shoehorn everything into making it look like manufacturing. But, you know, product development is not manufacturing. And Toyota's product development practices look nothing like their manufacturing processes. It's completely different. And that's a much less well-known area of lean...although the Lean Enterprise Institute has published good stuff on this book. Lean product development is completely different from lean production. And that was not as well-known and certainly not known by the people in the agile world. Our attitude was always, well, the circumstances change or even from one company to another, the tools might have to change. And so the skill you want to develop in our case as researchers, and advisors, and teachers, or in the case of practitioners, as leaders, or implementers, is keep learning about what other people are doing and what works for them and try to understand what the deeper principles are that you then use to construct a solution that's appropriate for that situation. That's really all it is. TROND: That's fabulous. So tell me then, apart from Lockheed Martin, what are some of the other organizations that you've worked with? How have they thought about these things? I mean, how does your community work? Is it essentially, I mean, before COVID at least, you met, and you discuss these things, and you sort of reflect on how they show up in your organizations and discuss best practices. Or do you kind of write papers together? How does this knowledge evolve in your approach? FRODE: It's important to point out here, like in the history of the company, which has been around now for (I'm feeling old.) 18 years, so after the first ten years, there was a big break because that's when we started working on okay, well, what comes after even the expansionist version of lean that we were doing, which was called the Lean Systems Framework? And that's when we started working on all of this post-lean stuff. And so the companies we worked with in the first decade were the likes of AT&T, and Sony, and Lockheed, and Honeywell, and mostly large companies, a few smaller ones too. But they had a lot of problems with complexity. And often, they were doing a combination of hardware and software. And they were in industries that had a lot of complexity. So in 2014, 2015, there was a big shift where I'd spent about six months to a year reading, talking to a bunch of people, trying to come up with what was going to be the next new thing. And that was kind of the journey for me as a founder as well because I felt like I'd done all this organizational redesign work, soup to nuts. And it wasn't just Kaizen. We did Kaikaku, which is much less known in the lean world, and that's radical redesign, basically. And we did this working on a board C-level with a lot of companies. TROND: Tell me more about Kaikaku. Because, like you said, it's not a vernacular that's really well-known outside of the inner circle of lean, I guess. FRODE: Yeah. So Kaikaku is where you look at an organization, and basically, instead of thinking about how do we put in mechanisms to start improving it incrementally, you say, "Well, there's so much low-hanging fruit here. And there's a breakthrough needed in a very short time. And we're just going to put together a design team, basically, a joint design team, and essentially redesign the whole thing and implement it. So it is a radical redesign. It hasn't been; at least, at the time we were doing it, there were not a lot of details available in the literature. And you heard stories like Ohno-san would walk into a factory and just say, "Well, this is completely unacceptable. Move this machine over here, and this machine over here. And can't you guys see..." So we didn't do it that way. We didn't tell the clients what the answer should be. We taught them. We had the executive spend a week with us learning about the Lean Systems Framework, and they mapped out the organization they had. And then, basically, we facilitated them through a process that could take sometimes a few weeks designing the organization the way it should be. And then there was an implementation project, and they put it in place, so... TROND: But Kaikaku basically is a bit more drastic than Kaizen. FRODE: Very much so. TROND: Yeah. So it's like a discontinuous sort of break. It's not necessarily that you tell people to do things differently, but you make it clear that things have to be different maybe in your own way. But you're certainly not going for continuous improvement without any kind of disruption. There will be disruption in Kaikaku. FRODE: I mean, it is disruption. And if you think of the Fremont Factory Toyota took over, that was a reboot. [laughs] And so now -- TROND: Right. So it's almost as if that's where you can use the software analogy because you're essentially rebooting a system. And rebooting, of course, you sometimes you're still stuck with the same system, but you are rebooting it. So you're presumably getting the original characteristics back. FRODE: So I think of it as sort of a reconfiguration. And in the case of the Fremont factory, of course, there were a bunch of people who were there before who were hired back but also some that weren't that we tend now to avoid just because the knowledge people had was valuable. And in most cases, the issue wasn't that people were malicious or completely incompetent. It was just that the design of the organization was just so wrong in so many ways. [laughs] And what we had to do, it was more of a gradual reboot in the sense that you had to keep the existing organization running. It had customers. It had obligations. And so it wasn't a shutdown of the factory, the proverbial factory, it wasn't that. But yeah, after I started looking at the effects of decentralization and starting to question these assumptions behind lean practices the way they had appeared in the mainstream, that was around the time, early 2015, I started to use the term post-lean. It wasn't because I thought I had all the answers yet or certainly, and still, I don't think I do. But it was clear that there was an inheritance from lean thinking in terms of engaging people in the organization to do things better. But the definition of better I thought would change, and the methods I thought would change. And the assumptions behind the methods, such as long-lasting organizations, long employee tenures, tight coupling between people in organizations, organizations taking a long time to grow to a large size, and human problem solving, which already was being eaten by software back then or elevated, I should say, by software, all of these assumptions needed to be revisited so... TROND: They did. But I have to say, what a gutsy kind of concept to call it post-lean. I mean, I co-wrote a book this year, and we're calling things Augmented Lean for the specific reason maybe that we actually agree with you that there are some things of lean that are really still relevant but also because it takes an enormous confidence, almost a hubris, to announce something post a very, very successful management principle. FRODE: It was the theoretical computer scientist in me. TROND: [laughs] FRODE: So I thought that surely from first principles, we could figure this out and not that it would be the same answer in every situation. But I think it was also, at that point, we had a decade of field experience behind us in doing customized organizational redesign with clients in many different industries. So we knew already that the answer wasn't going to be the same every time. And in a lot of the lean Literature, the assumption was that you weren't really going to dramatically change the organizational structure, for example, which we had a lot of experience with doing. And we already had experience with teams of teams, and just-in-time changes, and reconfigurations, and so on because we thought of organizations the way software people think of organizations which are, you know, they're computational objects that have humans, and then there are social, technical objects. And they're reconfigurable. And I think if you grew up in a manufacturing world, the shape of the organization is sort of attached to... there are physical buildings and equipment and all of that. So -- TROND: And this is so essential to discuss, Frode, because you're so right. And that's a real thing. And that's something we write about in our book as well. There is a very real sense that I think, honestly, the whole manufacturing sector but certainly the first automation efforts and, indeed, a lot of the digital efforts that have been implemented in manufacturing they took for granted that we cannot change this fact that we have infrastructure. We have people; we have machines; we have factories; we have shop floors. All of these things are fixed. Now we just got to figure out how to fit the humans in between, which is how they then interpreted waste, being let's reduce the physical waste so that humans can move around. But really, the overall paradigm seems to have been, and you correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to have been that the machines and the infrastructure was given, and the humans were the ones that had to adapt and reduce all this waste. And no one considered for a second that it could be that the machines were actually wasteful themselves [laughs] or put in the wrong place or in the wrong order or sequence or whatever you have. But with other types of organizations, this is obviously much easier to see it and much easier to change, I mean, also. FRODE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And software is an example of this because now we take for granted that a large percentage of the population works from home and don't want to go back. But if you are part of that 10%, 11% of the population working in a factory and you have to show up at the factory because that's where the machine is that goes ding, that, you know, [laughs] it's not work that requires only a low level of education of course. That hasn't been the case for a while. And these are people with master's degrees. And they're making sure all of this equipment runs. This is fancy equipment. So what we learned in that 10-year period was this is not just about workflow. It's a five-dimensional model, so there's workflow, organization structure, and knowledge management, the technology, architecture, the product you're making, and the culture. And all of these are five axes if you will, So 5D coordinate system and you can reconfigure. You can make organizations into anything you want. Now, the right answer might be different in different industries at different lifecycle stages of companies. And basically, our thinking was that we weren't going to just teach our clients or even help our clients. We certainly weren't going to just tell them the answer because I always thought that was a terrible idea. We were going to help them redesign themselves for their emerging landscape, their emerging situation, but also help them think about things, or learn to think about these things in general, so that if their landscape changed again, or if they merged with another company, then they had the thinking skills, and they understood what these different dimensions were to be able to redesign themselves again. TROND: That makes a lot of sense. FRODE: That's kind of the whole – TROND: I just want to insert here one thing that happened throughout, well, I mean, it was before your time, I guess. But remember, in the '70s, there was this concept among futurists, Toffler, and others that, oh, we are moving into a service economy. Manufacturing the real value now is in services. Well, that was a short-lasting fad, right? I mean, turns out we are still producing things. We're making things, and even the decentralization that you're talking about is not the end of the production economy. You produce, and you are, I mean, human beings produce. FRODE: No, I never thought that we would see the end of manufacturing. And the term post-industrial, he was not the person that coined it, I think. It was coined 10 or 20 years earlier. But there's a book by Daniel Bell, which is called The Coming of Post-industrial Society, where he talks about both the sociological challenges and the changes in the economy moving to a more service-based knowledge-based economy. Of course, what happened is manufacturing itself became more knowledge-based, but that was kind of the whole idea of what Toyota was doing. MID-ROLL AD: In the new book from Wiley, Augmented Lean: A Human-Centric Framework for Managing Frontline Operations, serial startup founder Dr. Natan Linder and futurist podcaster Dr. Trond Arne Undheim deliver an urgent and incisive exploration of when, how, and why to augment your workforce with technology, and how to do it in a way that scales, maintains innovation, and allows the organization to thrive. The key thing is to prioritize humans over machines. Here's what Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, says about the book: "Augmented Lean is an important puzzle piece in the fourth industrial revolution." Find out more on www.augmentedlean.com, and pick up the book in a bookstore near you. TROND: So, Frode, tell me a little bit about the future outlook. What are we looking at here in the lean post-industrial world? What will factories look like? What is knowledge work going to look like? FRODE: Yeah, so I think what we're going to see is that companies that do manufacturing are slowly but surely going to start to look like other kinds of companies or companies that do knowledge work. The content of manufacturing work has become more and more filled with knowledge work already. That's a process that's been going on for decades. As manufacturing technology improves, I think after many, many generations of new technology platforms, we are going to end up in a world where basically any product that you order is going to be either printed atom by atom in your home or in a microfactory, if it's a big bulky thing, in your neighborhood where you can rent capacity in a just-in-time basis. That's not going to happen overnight. This is going to take a few decades. But you can easily see how this kind of mirrors what happened to old chains like Kinko's and so on where if you needed something to be printed, I mean, I remember there were printers. [laughs] And then you had to go to the equivalent of a Kinko's, and you could, you know, if you wanted to print 100 copies of a manual back in the day when we still did that, you could get that done, and that was surely more efficient than doing it at home. And in your home office or at your office, you would have a laser printer. And now we have a $99 inkjet printer, or you just might get it included when you order your laptop, or you may not even care anymore because you have a tablet, and you're just looking at it on the tablet. So there's this phenomenon of some of the things getting smaller and almost disappearing. Now what has happened...this was underway for a while, but the relationship between people and companies has increasingly become more loosely coupled. So a big part of the post-industrial transition is that individuals are empowered, and organizations now become more of a means. They're not institutions that are supposed to last for a long time. I think that ideal is fading. And so they're in a means to an end to produce economic value. And every investor will agree it's just that they're going to be much more reconfigurable, a lot of management work. There's managing resources, tracking progress, tracking inventory, communicating with customers. A lot of that stuff is going to be eaten by software and powered by AI. That doesn't mean people go away. But I think that a lot of the repetitive management administrative work, much more than we can imagine today, will be eaten by software and AIs. TROND: But one of the consequences of that surely, Frode, is somewhat risky because there was a certain safety in the bureaucracy of any large organization, whether government or private, because you knew that, yes, they might be somewhat stiflingly and boring, I guess, or predictable, whatever you might want to call it, but at least they were around, and you could count on them being around. And if you wanted to know what approach was being applied, if you had experienced it once, you knew it. And if you were a government, you knew that this is the GE Way or this is the whatever way, and it was stable. But what you're charting here is something where the only stability might be in the configuration of machines but even that, of course, you know, evolves really rapidly. And even the algorithms and the AIs and whatever is put into the system will evolve. And then, the humans will move around between different organizational units a little quicker than before. So where do you control [laughs] what's happening here? FRODE: So one of the things to keep in mind...I'll answer this from a technical perspective but also from a sociological perspective. So I'll take the latter first. So we are used to a world of hierarchies. So from the invention of agriculture, that's when silos were invented. The first organizational silos were actually centered around corn silos [laughs] and so a shared resource, right? And we need governance for that, you know, who gets the corn and how much your family's already had enough this week and so on. And then, in the Bronze Age, you see more specialization of labor and more hierarchies. So the pyramids were built by determined organizations. [laughs] so just like Melvin Conway would tell us. And the same happened with The Industrial Revolution. So you had management; you had oversight. And then as we are thinking about this matured, you know, we developed this notion of organizational values. So that had to do with the day-to-day behavior so people, including managers, and how they should treat their people and what the employee experience should be like. And then kind of management is about organizing people or organizing people and resources to pursue short or long-term objectives. So, what happens if the AI goes crazy? What happens if there's a bug in the software if there is a flaw? On the technical side of this, what I would say is just like we have people who are concerned about safety with robots, industrial robots in factories, you're going to have people who look at the same kind of thing in organizations. You're also going to have AI watching AIs. So you're going to have a lot of software mechanisms that are there for safety. People also have the option to leave. The threshold for quitting your job now and you log out from your current employer if you're sitting in your home in the Caribbean somewhere [laughs] because you can live wherever you want and logging in somewhere else and taking a job, that threshold is lower than ever. So organizations have an incentive to treat their people well. TROND: Well, the interesting thing, though, is that Silicon Valley has been like that for years. I mean, that was the joke about Silicon Valley that you changed your job faster than you changed your parking space. FRODE: [laughs] TROND: Because your parking space is like really valued territory. It's like, okay, here's where I park. But you might go into a different part of the office building or in a different office building. So this has been part of some part of high tech for the industry for a while. But now I guess you're saying it's becoming globalized and generalized. FRODE: Yeah. And part of it it's the nature of those kinds of jobs, you know, of doing knowledge work that's where you're not tied to equipment or location as much. Now, of course, in Silicon Valley, you've had people go back and forth about, and not just here but in other innovation hubs too, about the importance of being together in the room. You're doing brainstorming. You are talking to potential customers. You're prototyping things with Post-it Notes. People have to be there. And I think there's an added incentive because of the pandemic and people wanting to work from home more to develop better collaboration tools than Post-it Notes on whiteboards. But the last data we have on this is pre-pandemic, so I can't tell you exactly what they are today. But the employee tenures for startups in Silicon Valley when we looked last was 10.8 months average tenure. And for the larger tech companies, you know, the Apples and the Googles and so on, was a little bit more than two years so between two and three years, basically. And so because more jobs in the economy are moving into that category of job where there's a lower threshold for switching, and there's a high demand for people who can do knowledge work, you're going to see average employee tenders going down just like average organization lifespans have been going down because of innovation. TROND: Which presumably, Frode, also means that productivity has to go up because you have to ramp up these people really fast. So your incentive is Frode started yesterday. He's already contributing to a sprint today, and on Thursday, he is launching a product with his team. Because otherwise, I mean, these are expensive workers, and they're only going to be around for a year. When is your first innovation? FRODE: It depends on where the company focuses its innovation. And this will not be the common case, but let's say that you are developing a whole new kind of computing device and a whole new operating system that's going to be very different. You have to learn about everything that's been done so far, and it takes a lot to get started. If what you are doing is more sort of applied, so you're developing apps to be used internally in an insurance company, and you're an app developer, and you know all of the same platforms and tools that they're already using because that was one of the criteria for getting the job, yeah, then you ramp up time is going to be much shorter. All of these companies they will accept the fact, have had to accept the fact, that people just don't stay as long in their jobs. That also gives some added incentive to get them up and running quickly and to be good to people. And I think that's good. I think it's nice that employers have to compete for talent. They have to have to treat their people well. I think it's a much better solution than unions, where you would basically try to have a stranglehold on employers on behalf of all the workers. And the less commoditized work is, the less standardized the work is in that sense. The less business models like those of unions, whether they're voluntarily or involuntarily, because the government sort of makes it easier for them to set up that relationship and sort themselves. The thing that surprised me is that now and as we're coming out of COVID, unions in the United States are making somewhat of a comeback. And I'm sort of scratching my head. Maybe this means that there are a lot of companies where they have scaled because of IT, Amazon being an example. They wouldn't have been able to scale the way they have without information technology. But they haven't yet gotten to the point where they have automated a bunch of these jobs. So they've hired so many people doing soul-sucking repetitive work, and they're doing their best to treat them well. But the whole mentality of the people who have designed this part of the organization is very Taylorist. And so people are complaining, and they're having mental health problems and so on. And then yeah, then there's going to be room for someone to come and say, "Well, hey, we can do a better job negotiating for you." But gradually, over time, fewer and fewer jobs will be like that. One of the sort of interesting aspects of the post-industrial transition is that you have industries...well, some industries, like online retail on the historical scales, is still a young industry. But you have industries that when IT was young, you know, I think the oldest software company in the U.S. was started in 1958. So in the aftermath of that, when you started seeing software on mainframes and so on, what software made possible was scaling up management operations for companies. So they made them more scalable. You could open more plants. You could open more offices, whether it was manufacturing or service businesses. And this happened before people started using software to automate tasks, which is a more advanced use. And the more complex the job is, and the more dexterity is required, physically moving things, the higher the R&D investment is required to automate those jobs. The technology that's involved in that is going to become commoditized. And it's going to spread. And so what you're going to see is even though more people have been hired to do those kinds of jobs because the management operations have scaled, fewer people are going to be needed in the next 10-20 years because the R&D investment is going to pay off for automating all of those tasks. And so then we're going to get back to eventually...I like to think of Amazon as just like it's a layer in the business stack or technology stack. So if I need something shipped from A to B or I need to have some sort of a virtual shopping facility, [laughs] I'm not going to reinvent Amazon, but Amazon has to become more efficient. And so the way they become more efficient is drone delivery of packages and then just-in-time production. And then, they take over everything except for the physical specifications for the product to be manufactured. TROND: It's interesting you say that because I guess if you are Amazon right now, you're thinking of yourself in much wider terms than you just said. But what I'm thinking, Frode is that I'm finding your resident Scandinavian. I'm seeing your Scandinavianhood here. The way you talk about meaningful work, and knowledge work, and how workers should have dignity and companies should treat people well, I found that very interesting. And I think if that aspect of the Scandinavian workplace was to start to be reflected globally, that would be a good thing. There are some other aspects perhaps in Scandinavia which you left behind, and I left behind, that we perhaps should take more inspiration from many other places in the world that have done far better in terms of either manufacturing, or knowledge work, or innovation, or many other things. But that aspect, you know -- FRODE: It's a big discussion itself. I mean, I was kind of a philosophical refugee from Norway. I was a tech-oriented, free-market person. I didn't like unions. I didn't like the government. TROND: [laughs] FRODE: But at the same time, that didn't mean I thought that people should not be treated well that worked into the ground. I thought people should just have healthy voluntary sort of collaborative relationships in business or otherwise. And I've seen technology as a means of making that happen. And I have no sympathy with employers that have trouble with employees because they treat people like crap. I think it's well deserved. But I also have no sympathy with unions that are strong-arming employers. TROND: You have just listened to another episode of the Augmented Podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. The topic was Post Lean, and our guest was Frode Odegard, Chairman, and CEO at the Post-Industrial Institute. In this conversation, we talked about the post-industrial enterprise. My takeaway is that lean is a fundamental perspective on human organizations, but clearly, there were things not foreseen in the lean paradigm, both in terms of human and in terms of machine behavior. What are those things? How do they evolve? We have to start speculating now; otherwise, we will be unprepared for the future. One of the true questions is job stability. Will the assumptions made by early factory jobs ever become true again? And if not, how do you retain motivation in a workforce that's transient? Will future organizational forms perfect this task? Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. And if you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 102 on Lean Manufacturing with Michel Baudin. Hopefully, you'll find something awesome in these or in other episodes, and if so, do let us know by messaging us; we would love to share your thoughts with other listeners. The Augmented Podcast is created in association with Tulip, the frontline operation platform that connects people, machines, devices, and systems in a production or logistics process in a physical location. Tulip is democratizing technology and empowering those closest to operations to solve problems. Tulip is also hiring, and you can find Tulip at tulip.co. Please go ahead and share this show with colleagues who care about where industrial tech is heading. To find us on social media is easy; we are Augmented Pod on LinkedIn and Twitter and Augmented Podcast on Facebook and YouTube. Augmented — industrial conversations that matter. See you next time. Special Guest: Frode Odegaard.

Agile and Project Management - DrunkenPM Radio
In Defense of Frederick Taylor w Christine Li

Agile and Project Management - DrunkenPM Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2023 39:36


In this episode, I am joined by a very special guest, Christine Li, for a conversation I have been waiting to record for quite a while now. Backstory I am closing in on 30 years of work in Project Management and for most of that time, I, like many of you, have been talking smack about Frederick Taylor. My opinions were based on the things I learned from others along the way and were (obviously) deeply informed by moving from traditional PM over to Agile. As far as I was concerned, this guy was the birth of work misery. But over the past few years, I've started to develop this weird compulsion to stick up for the good bits that came out of his work. I mean, literally, no one working in project management or agile would have a job without this guy. You can also make an argument that without him the United States never would have made it through WWII. Even though I was willing to have Taylor's back in an argument, there was one thing missing… I had never actually read his work. CUE ALL THE PM SHAME! So I did. I read The Principles of Scientific Management. And, to my shock, not only was it easy to read, but it was fun to read how this guy figured out the things he figured out. Yes, there are a few critical issues with his approach (and they are big issues), but there is a TON of good stuff in there that we all ignore because he's such an easy target. (And I really want to go back in time and get hired as SPEED BOSS) After reading it, I was at a lunch and happened to mention my newfound Taylor Fanboy-ness and Christine Li showed up like Yoda, deep with the PM history geek. She took me to school and that is where this conversation starts. My hope is that even if you think Frederick Taylor is the Sauron of Project Management, you'll give this a listen. Maybe it will challenge your understanding of him and his work. Maybe it will (I hope) entice you to read his work. And even if you've read his work and can see the good in it, the things Christine shares will level up your understanding as well. I am very grateful to her for making time for this. It was a really fun conversation. For Further Reading The Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Taylor bit.ly/3H8XtPG Scientific Management; a History and Criticism by Horace Drury https://bit.ly/3QFhEIr Contacting Christine Web: https://www.sparkplugagility.com Email: christine@sparkplugagility.com

Killer Innovations: Successful Innovators Talking About Creativity, Design and Innovation | Hosted by Phil McKinney

Benchmarking is the comparing of your organization to others to measure your performance and possibly identify areas for improvement. It has been common practice since the early 1900s. Frederick Taylor, an American mechanical engineer, is credited with coining the term “benchmarking” in his book, The Principles of Scientific Management. Benchmarking enables continuous learning and improvement […]

The Geoff Calkins Show
GC Show w/...John continued on Bronny, then Herrington on Grizz excitement for schedule, Sports Movies later with Jeffery & Frederick Taylor

The Geoff Calkins Show

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2022 41:25


GC Show w/...John continued on Bronny, then Herrington on Grizz excitement for schedule, Sports Movies later with Jeffery & Frederick Taylor

Kenny & JT
Fr3deR1ck (FREDERICK TAYLOR) – EMMY AWARD-WINNING FILMMAKER

Kenny & JT

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2022 18:31


On The Kenny & JT Show, we're joined by Fr3deR1ck, Emmy Award-wining filmmaker, for a discussion on sports and music documentaries.

Sürekli İyileştirme Yolculuğu
Sesli Yazı #15 : Sürekli İyileştirme Hikayeleri

Sürekli İyileştirme Yolculuğu

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 29, 2022 7:01


Geçmişten sürekli iyileştirme hikayeleri, bugün bildiğimiz birçok iyileştirme aracının nasıl ortaya çıktığını ve çok uzun yıllardır kullandığımız araçlar olduğunu gözler önüne seriyor. 00:15 Peronnet 01:20 Frederick Taylor 03:45 Walter Shewart 05:17 Deming Web adresi: www.yalin-dunya.com Diğer sosyal medya hesapları: Instagram : https://instagram.com/yalindunya_yeniden Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/company/yalın-dünya/?viewAsMember=true #sürekliiyileştirmehikayeleri #operasyonelmükemmellik

Greater Than Code
263: Security Education, Awareness, Behavior, and Culture with Kat Sweet

Greater Than Code

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 15, 2021 46:51


02:01 - Kat's Superpower: Terrible Puns! * Puns & ADHD; Divergent Thinking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking) * Punching Down (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=punching%20down) * Idioms (https://www.ef.edu/english-resources/english-idioms/) 08:07 - Security Awareness Education & Accessibility * Phishing * Unconscious Bias Training That Works (https://hbr.org/2021/09/unconscious-bias-training-that-works) * Psychological Safety * 239: Accessibility and Sexuality with Eli Holderness (https://www.greaterthancode.com/accessibility-and-sexuality) * Management Theory of Frederick Taylor (https://www.business.com/articles/management-theory-of-frederick-taylor/) * Building a Security Culture For Oh Sh*t Moments | Human Layer Security Summit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=21&v=d2girBtrbCQ&feature=emb_logo) * Decision Fatigue 20:58 - Making the Safe Thing Easy * (in)Secure Development - Why some product teams are great and others aren't… (https://tldrsec.com/blog/insecure-development-why-some-product-teams-are-great-and-others-arent/) * The Swiss Cheese Model of Error Prevention (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1298298/) 22:43 - Awareness; Security Motivation; Behavior and Culture (ABC) * AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_(marketing)) * Inbound Marketing (https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing) 33:34 - Dietary Accessibility; Harm Reduction and Threat Monitoring * Celiac Disease (https://celiac.org/about-celiac-disease/what-is-celiac-disease/) * A Beginner's Guide to a Low FODMAP Diet (https://www.benefiber.com/fiber-in-your-life/fiber-and-wellness/beginners-guide-to-low-fodmap-diet/?gclsrc=aw.ds&gclid=Cj0KCQiAnuGNBhCPARIsACbnLzqJkfl2XxxUQVSAGU96cmdVl5S7gn6GXnOQAHf-Sn0zEHvBBKINObUaAlOvEALw_wcB) * Casin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casein) * DisInfoSec 2021: Kat Sweet - Dietary Accessibility in Tech Workplaces (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG1DApAlcK4&feature=youtu.be) Reflections: John: Internal teams relating to other internal teams as a marketing issue. Casey: Phishing emails cause harm. Kat: AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_(marketing)) Unconscious Bias Training That Works (https://hbr.org/2021/09/unconscious-bias-training-that-works) The Responsible Communication Style Guide (https://rcstyleguide.com/) This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That's link.testdouble.com/greater. JOHN: Welcome to Episode 263 of Greater Than Code. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey! And we're both here with our guest today, Kat Sweet. Hi, Kat. KAT: Hi, John! Hi, Casey! CASEY: Well, Kat Sweet is a security professional who specializes in security education and engagement. She currently works at HubSpot building out their employee security awareness program, and is also active in their disability ERG, Employee Resource Group. Since 2017, she has served on the staff of the security conference BSides Las Vegas, co-leading their lockpick village. Her other superpower is terrible puns, or, if they're printed on paper—she gave me this one—tearable puns. [laughter] KAT: Like written paper. CASEY: Anyway. Welcome, Kat. So glad to have you. KAT: Thanks! I'm happy to be here. CASEY: Let's kick it off with our question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? KAT: [chuckles] Well, as I was saying to both of y'all before this show started, I was thinking I'm going to do a really serious skillful superpower that makes me sound smart because that's what a lot of other people did in theirs. I don't know, something like I'm a connector, or I am good at crosspollination. Then I realized no, [chuckles] like it, or not, terrible puns are my actual superpower. [laughter] Might as well just embrace it. I think as far as where I acquired it, probably a mix of forces. Having a dad who was the king of dad puns certainly helped and actually, my dad's whole extended family is really into terrible puns as well. We have biweekly Zoom calls and they just turn into everyone telling bad jokes sometimes. [laughter] But I think it also probably helps that, I don't know, having ADHD, my brain hops around a lot and so, sometimes makes connections in weird places. Sometimes that happens with language and there were probably also some amount of influences just growing up, I don't know, listening to Weird Al, gets puns in his parodies. Oh, and Carlos from The Magic School Bus. CASEY: Mm hmm. Role models. I agree. Me too. [laughter] KAT: Indeed. So now I'm a pundit. CASEY: I got a pun counter going in my head. It just went ding! KAT: Ding! [laughter] CASEY: I never got – [overtalk] KAT: They've only gotten worse during the pandemic. CASEY: Oh! Ding! [laughter] Maybe we'll keep it up. We'll see. I never thought of the overlap of puns and ADHD. I wonder if there's any study showing if it does correlate. It sounds right. It sounds right to me. KAT: Yeah, that sounds like a thing. I have absolutely no idea, but I don't know, something to do with divergent thinking. CASEY: Yeah. JOHN: Yeah. I'm on board with that. CASEY: Sometimes I hang out in the channels on Slack that are like #puns, or #dadjokes. Are you in any of those? What's the first one that comes to mind for you, your pun community online? KAT: Oh yeah. So actually at work, I joined my current role in August and during the first week, aside from my regular team channels, I had three orders of business. I found the queer ERG Slack channel, I found the disability ERG Slack channel, and I found the dad jokes channel. [laughter] That was a couple of jobs ago when I worked at Duo Security. I've been told that some of them who are still there are still talking about my puns because we would get [laughs] pretty bad pun threads going in the Slack channels there. CASEY: What a good reputation. KAT: Good, bad, whatever. [laughs] CASEY: Yeah. KAT: I don't know. Decent as a form of humor that's safe for work goes, too because it's generally hard to, I guess, punch down with them other than the fact that everyone's getting punched with a really bad pun, but they're generally an equalizing force. [chuckles] CASEY: Yeah. I love that concept. Can you explain to our listeners, punching down? KAT: So this is now the Great British Bake Off and we're talking about bread. No, just kidding. [laughter] No, I think in humor a lot of times, sometimes people talk about punching up versus punching down in terms of who is actually in on the joke. When you're trying to be funny, are you poking fun at people who are more marginalized than you, or are you poking at the people with a ton of privilege? And I know it's not always an even concept because obviously, intersectionality is a thing and it's not just a – privilege isn't a linear thing. But generally, what comes to mind a lot is, I don't know, white comedians making fun of how Black people talk, or men comedians making rape jokes at women's expense, or something like that. Like who's actually being punched? [chuckles] CASEY: Yeah. KAT: Obviously, ideally, you don't want to punch anyone, but that whole concept of where's the humor directed and is it contributing to marginalization? CASEY: Right, right. And I guess puns aren't really punching at all. KAT: Yeah. CASEY: Ding! KAT: Ding! There goes the pun counter. Yeah, the only thing I have to mindful of, too is not over relying on them in my – my current role is in a very global company so even though all employees speak English to some extent, English isn't everyone's first language and there are going to be some things that fly over people's heads. So I don't want to use that exclusively as a way to connect with people. CASEY: Right, right. JOHN: Yeah. It is so specific to culture even, right. Because I would imagine even UK English would have a whole gray area where the puns may not land and vice versa. KAT: Oh, totally. Just humor in general is so different in every single culture. Yeah, it's really interesting. JOHN: Yeah, that reminds me. Actually, just today, I started becoming weirdly aware as I was typing something to one of my Indian colleagues and I'm not sure what triggered it, but I started being aware of all the idioms that I was using and what I was typing. I was like, “Well, this is what I would normally say to an American,” and I'm just like, “Wait, is this all going to come through?” I think that way might lead to madness, though if you start trying to analyze every idiom you use as you're speaking. But it was something that just suddenly popped into my mind that I'm going to try and keep being a little bit more aware of because there's so many ways to miss with communication when you rely on obscure idioms, or certain ways of saying things that aren't nearly as clear as they could be. [chuckles] KAT: Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure that's definitely a thing in all the corporate speak about doubling down, circling back, parking lots, and just all the clicking, all of those things. [laughter] But yeah, that's actually something that was on my run recently, too with revamping one of the general security awareness courses that everyone gets is that in the way we talk about how to look for a phishing – spot a phishing email. First of all, one of the things that at least they didn't do was say, “Oh, look for poor grammar, or misspelled words,” because that's automatically really exclusive to people whose first language isn't English, or people who have dyslexia. But I was also thinking we talk about things like subtle language cues in suspicious emails around a sense of urgency, like a request being made trying to prey on your emotion and I'm like, “How accessible is that, I guess, for people whose first language is English to try and spot a phishing email based on those kind of things?” Like how much – [chuckles] how much is too much to ask of…? Like opinions about phishing emails, or the phishing training anyway being too much to ask of people to some degree, but I don't know. There's so much subtlety in it that just is really easy for people to lose. JOHN: Yeah. I mean, I would imagine that even American English speakers – [overtalk] KAT: Yeah. JOHN: With a lot of experience still have trouble. Like actually, [chuckles] I just got apparently caught by one of them, the test phishing emails, but they notified me by sending me an email and saying, “You were phished, click here to go to the training.” And I'm like, “I'm not going to click on that!” [laughter] I just got phished! KAT: Yeah. JOHN: But I think my larger point is again, you're talking about so many subtleties of language and interpretations to try and tease these things out. I'm sure there are a lot of people with a range of non-typical neurologies where that sort of thing isn't going to be obvious, even if they are native English speakers. KAT: Exactly. Myself included having ADHD. [laughs] JOHN: Yeah. KAT: Yeah. It's been interesting trying to think through building out security awareness stuff in my current role and in past roles, and having ADHD and just thinking about how ADHD unfriendly a lot of the [laughs] traditional approaches are to all this. Even like you were just saying, “You got phished, take this training.” It seems like the wrong sequence of events because if you're trying to teach someone a concept, you need to not really delay the amount of time in between presenting somebody with a piece of information and giving them a chance to commit it to memory. ADHD-ers have less working memory than neurotypical people to begin with, but that concept goes for everyone. So when you're giving someone training that they might not actually use in practice for several more months until they potentially get phished again, then it becomes just information overload. So that's something that I think about. Another way that I see this playing out in phishing training in particular, but other security awareness stuff is motivation and reward because we have a less amount of intrinsic motivation. Something like, I don't know, motivation and reward system just works differently with people who have trouble hanging onto dopamine. ADHD-ers and other people's various executive dysfunction stuff. So when you're sitting through security training that's not engaging, that's not particular lead novel, or challenging, or of personal interest, or is going to have a very delayed sense of reward rather than something that immediately gratifying, there's going to be a limitation to how much people will actually learn, be engaged, and can actually be detrimental. So I definitely think about stuff like that. CASEY: That reminds me of a paper I read recently about—I said this on a previous episode, too. I guess, maybe I should find the paper, dig it up, and share. KAT: Cool. [laughter] CASEY: Oh, but it said, “Implicit bias awareness training doesn't work at all ever” was an original paper. No, that's not what it said of course, but that's how people read it and then a follow-up said, “No, boring! PowerPoint slide presentations that aren't interactive aren't interactive.” [laughter] “But the interactive ones are.” Surprise! KAT: Right. That's the thing. That's the thing. Yeah, and I think there's also just, I don't know. I remember when I was first getting into security, people were in offices more and security awareness posters were a big thing. Who is going to remember that? Who's going to need to know that they need to email security at when they're in the bathroom? [laughs] Stuff like that that's not particularly engaging nor particularly useful in the moment. But that DEI paper is an interesting one, too. I'll have to read that. CASEY: Do you have experience making some of these trainings more interactive and getting the quicker reward that's not delayed and what does that look like for something like phishing, or another example? KAT: It's a mixed bag and it's something that I'm still kind of – there's something that I'm figuring out just as we're scaling up because in past roles, mostly been in smaller companies. But one thing that I think people, who are building security awareness and security education content for employees, miss is the fact that there's a certain amount of baseline level of interaction and context that you can't really automate a way, especially for new hires. I know having just gone through process that onboarding weeks are always kind of information overload. But people are going to at least remember more, or be more engaged if they're getting some kind of actual human contact with somebody who they're going to be working with; they've got the face, they've got some context for who their security team is, what they do, and they won't just be clicking through a training that's got canned information that is no context to where they're working and really no narrative and nowhere for them to ask questions. Because I always get really interesting questions every time I give some kind of live security education stuff; people are curious. I think it's important that security education and engagement is really an enhancer to a security program. It can't be carrying all the weight of relationships between the security team and the rest of the company. You're going to get dividends by having ongoing positive relationships with your colleagues that aren't just contact the security team once a year during training. CASEY: And even John's email, like the sample test email, which I think is better than not doing it for sure. But that's like a ha ha got you. That's not really [chuckles] relationship building. Barely. You've got to already have the relationship for it to – [overtalk] KAT: No, it's not and that's – yeah. And that's why I think phishing campaigns are so tricky. I think they're required by some compliance frameworks and by cyber insurance frameworks. So some places just have to have them. You can't just say we're not going to run internal phishing campaigns, unfortunately, regardless of whether that's actually the right thing for businesses. But I think the angle should always be familiarizing people with how to report email like that to the security team and reinforcing psychological safety. Not making people feel judged, not making people feel bad, and also not making them sit through training if they get caught because that's not psychological safety either and it really doesn't pay attention to results. It's very interesting, I remember I listened to your episode with Eli Holderness and at some point, one of the hosts mentioned something about human factors and safety science on the evolving nature of how people management happens in the workplace. How there was this old model of humans being a problem to be managed, supervised, and well, just controlled and how the new view of organizational psychology and people management is more humans are your source of success so you need to enable their growth and build them up. I think a lot of security education approaches are kind of still stuck in that old model, almost. I've seen progress, but I think a lot of them have a lot of work to do in still being, even if they're not necessarily as antagonistic, or punitive, they still feel sometimes paternalistic. Humans are like, “If I hear the phrase, ‘Humans are the weakest link one more time,' I'm going to table flip.” First of all, humans are all the links, but also – [overtalk] JOHN: Yeah. KAT: It's saying like, we need to save humans, which are somehow the security team is not humans. We need to save humans from themselves because they're too incompetent to know what to do. So we need, yeah – which is a terrible attitude. CASEY: Yeah. KAT: And I think it misses the point that first of all, not everyone is going to become a security expert, or hypervigilant all the time and that's okay. But what we can do is focus on the good relationships, focus on making the training we have and need to do somewhat interactive and personal and contextual, and let go of the things you can't control. [chuckles] JOHN: Yeah, I think Taylorism is the name for that management style. I think it came around in the 40s and – [overtalk] KAT: Really? JOHN: Yeah, ruined a lot of lives. [laughs] Yeah, and I think your point about actually accepting the individual humanity of the people you're trying to influence and work with rather than as some sort of big amorphous group of fuckups, [laughs] for lack of a better word. Giving them some credit, giving them, like you said, something that's not punitive, somewhere where they don't get punished for their security lapses, or forgetting a thing, or clicking the link is going to be a lot more rewarding than, like you said, just making someone sit through training. Like for me, the training I want from whatever it was I clicked on is show me the email I clicked on, I will figure out how it tricked me and then I will learn. I don't need a whole – [overtalk] KAT: Yes. JOHN: 3 hours of video courses, or whatever. I will see the video, [chuckles] I will see the email, and that is a much more organic thing than here's the training for you. KAT: Exactly. Yeah, you have to again, give some people a way to actually commit it to memory. Get it out of RAM and into SSD. JOHN: Yeah. [laughter] KAT: But yeah, I love that and fortunately, I think some other places are starting to do interesting, innovative approaches. My former colleague, Kim Burton, who was the Security Education Lead at Duo when I was there and just moved to Texas, gave a webinar recently on doing the annuals security training as a choose your own adventure so that it could be replicated among a wide group of people, but that people could take various security education stuff that was specific to their own role and to their own threat model. I really liked that. I like being able to give people some amount of personalization and get them actually thinking about what they're specifically interacting with. JOHN: Yeah, yeah. That's great and it also makes me think about there are undoubtedly things I'm pretty well informed in security and other things that I'm completely ignorant about. I'd rather not sit through a training that covers both of those things. Like if there's a way for me to choose my own adventure through it so that I go to the parts where I'm actually learning useful things. Again, a, it saves everybody time and b, it means I'm not fast forwarding through the video, hoping it'll just end, and then possibly missing things that are actually useful to me. CASEY: I'm thinking of a concrete example, I always remember and think of and that's links and emails. I always hover and look at the URL except when I'm on my phone and you can't do that. Oh, I don't know. It has never come up in a training I've seen. KAT: Yeah, you can click and hold, but it's harder and I think that speaks to the fact that security teams should lead into putting protections around email security more so than relying entirely on their user base to hover every single link, or click and hold on their phone, or just do nothing when it comes to reporting suspicious emails. There's a lot of decision fatigue that, I think security teams still put on people whose job is not security and I hope that that continues to shift over time. JOHN: Yeah. I mean, you're bringing up the talking about management and safety theory that probably came from Rein Henrichs, who is one of our other hosts. But one of the things he also has talked about on, I think probably multiple shows is about setting the environment for the people that makes the safe thing easy. KAT: Right. JOHN: So that all the defaults roll downhill into safety and security rather than well, here's a level playing field you have to navigate yourself through and there's some potholes and da, da, da, and you have to be aware of them and constantly on alert and all those things. Whereas, if you tilt the field a little bit, you make sure everything runs in the right direction, then the right thing becomes the easy thing and then you win. KAT: Exactly, exactly. I think it's important to put that not only in the technical defaults – [overtalk] JOHN: Yeah, yeah. KAT: But also process defaults to some degree. One of my colleagues just showed me a talk that was, I think from perhaps at AppSec Cali. I'll have to dig it up. But there was somebody talking about making I guess, threat modeling and anti-abuse mindsets more of a default in product development teams and how they added one single line to their sprint planning—how could this feature potentially be misused by a user—and that alone just got people thinking just that little process change. JOHN: Yeah. That's beautiful. But such a small thing, but constantly repeated at a low level. It's not yelling at anyone to… KAT: Yeah. JOHN: Yeah. KAT: Yeah. And even if the developers and product designers themselves weren't security experts, or anti-abuse experts, it would just get them thinking, “Oh hey, we should reach out to the trust and safety team.” CASEY: Yeah. I'm thinking about so many steps and so many of these steps could be hard. The next one here is the security team responsive and that has a lot to do with are they well-staffed and is this a priority for them? Oh my goodness. KAT: Yeah. [laughs] So many things. CASEY: It's layers. But I'm sure you've heard of this, Kat. The Swiss cheese model of error prevention? KAT: Yeah. Defense in depth. CASEY: Yeah. [chuckles] I like to bring it up on the podcast, too because a lot of engineers and a lot of non-security people don't know about it. KAT: Hmm. CASEY: Do you want to explain it? I don't mind. I can. KAT: Oh, yeah. Basically that there are going to be holes in every step of the process, or the tech and so, that's why it's important to have this layered approach. Because over time, even if something gets through the first set of holes, it may not get through a second set where the holes are in different spots. So you end up with a giant stack of Swiss cheese, which is delicious, and you come out with something that's hopefully pretty same. [laughter] CASEY: Yeah, and it's the layers that are – the mind-blowing thing here is that there can be more than one layer. We don't just need one layer of Swiss cheese on this sandwich, which is everybody pay attention and don't ever get phished, or it's your fault. You can have so many layers than that. It can be like a grilled cheese, really, really thick, grilled cheese. [laughter] KAT: Yes. A grilled cheese where the bread is also cheese. CASEY: Yes! [laughs] MID-ROLL: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange. Compiler unravels industry topics, trends, and the things you've always wanted to know about tech, through interviews with the people who know it best. On their show, you will hear a chorus of perspectives from the diverse communities behind the code. Compiler brings together a curious team of Red Hatters to tackle big questions in tech like, what is technical debt? What are tech hiring managers actually looking for? And do you have to know how to code to get started in open source? I checked out the “Should Managers Code?” episode of Compiler, and I thought it was interesting how the hosts spoke with Red Hatters who are vocal about what role, if any, that managers should have in code bases—and why they often fight to keep their hands on keys for as long as they can. Listen to Compiler on Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. We'll also include a link in the show notes. Our thanks to Compiler for their support. CASEY: Earlier, you mentioned awareness, Kat as something interesting. You want to talk about awareness more as a term and how it relates to this? KAT: Oh, yeah. So I – and technically, my job title has security awareness in it, but the more I've worked in the security space doing employee security education stuff as part of all my job. I know language isn't perfect, but I'm kind of the mindset that awareness isn't a good capture of what a role like mine actually should be doing because awareness without behavior change, or action is just noise. It's just we're all very aware of things, but if we don't have an environment that's friendly to us putting that awareness into some kind of action, or engagement, or response, we are just aware and scared. [laughs] CASEY: Yeah, awareness alone just makes us feel bad. We need more than that. KAT: Yeah. So I think security awareness is sometimes just a product of a term that got standardized over several years as it's in all of the compliance control frameworks, security awareness is a part of it. I don't know it's the best practice thing. I hope over time it will continue to evolve. CASEY: Yeah. KAT: As with any other kind of domains. JOHN: Yeah. I think that maybe security motivation might be a better term for it. KAT: I've seen a bunch of different ones used. So I end up speaking in terms of, I don't know, security education and engagement is what I'm working on. Security culture is my vision. I've seen things like security awareness, behavior, and culture, ABC, things like that. But all this to say security awareness not being in a vacuum. CASEY: I like those. This reminds me of a framework I've been thinking about a lot and I use in some of my DEI workshops. AIDA is an acronym. A-I-D-A. The first one's Awareness, the last one is Action, and in the middle is Interest and Desire. KAT: Nice. CASEY: So the questions I use to frame is like, are they aware of, for example, if they're misgendering someone? That's the context I'm using this in a lot. Are they aware of this person's pronouns in the first place? Are they interested in caring about this person and do they want to do anything about it and did they do it? Did they use their proper pronouns? Did they correct their actions? It's like 4 stages – [overtalk] KAT: I like that. CASEY: AIDA. It's used in marketing a lot for like a sales funnel, but I apply it to all sorts of how do you get someone from aware to action? KAT: I like that a lot. It's been interesting working at a place that makes a product that's more in the sales and marketing space. Definitely learned a lot because a couple of previous roles I've had been with security vendors. I think one of the interesting ideas that was a new concept to me when I started was this idea of inbound marketing, where instead of just cold contacting people and telling them, “Be interested in us, be interested in us, buy our stuff,” you generate this reputation as being of good service by putting out useful free nuggets of content, like blog posts, webinars, and things. Then you get people who are interested based on them knowing that you've got this, that you offer a good perspective, and then they all their friend. They are satisfied customers, and they go promote it to people. I think about this as it applies to security teams and the services they provide, because even though corporate security teams are internal, they've still got internal customers. They've still got services that they provide for people. So by making sure that the security team is visible, accessible, and that the good services that they provide are known and you've got satisfied customers, they become promoters to the rest of their teams. Think about like security can definitely learn a lot from [chuckles] these sales and marketing models. CASEY: I can totally imagine the security team being the fun team, the one you want to go work with and do workshops with because they make it so engaging and you want to. You can afford to spend your time on this thing. [laughter] KAT: Oh yes. CASEY: You might do it. [laughter] JOHN: Yeah, and I think marketing's a great model for that. Marketing sort of has a bad reputation, I think amongst a lot of people because it's done badly and evilly by a lot of people. But it's certainly possible and I think inbound market is one of those ways that you're engaging, you're spreading awareness, you're letting people select themselves into your service, and bring their interest to you. If you can develop that kind of rapport with the employees at your company as a security team, everybody wins. KAT: Yeah, absolutely, and it can absolutely be done. When I was working at Duo a couple jobs ago, I was on their security operations team and we were responsible, among other things, for both, the employee security education and being the point of intake; being the people that our colleagues would reach out to with security concerns to security and it definitely could see those relationships pay off by being visible and being of good service. CASEY: So now I'm getting my product manager hat on, like team management. KAT: Yeah. CASEY: I will want to choose the right metrics for a security team that incentivizes letting this marketing kind of approach happen and being the fun team people want to reach out to have the bigger impact and probably the highest metric is like nobody gets a security breach. But that can't be the only one because maybe you'll have a lucky year and maybe you'll have an unlucky that's not the best one. What other metrics are you thinking of? KAT: That's the thing, there's a lot more that goes into not getting pwned than how aware of security people are. There's just way too many factors to that. But – [overtalk] CASEY: Yeah. I guess, I'm especially interested in the human ones, like how come – [overtalk] KAT: Oh, yeah. And I mean like – [overtalk] CASEY: The department allowed to do the things that would be effective, like incentivized and measured in a sense. KAT: Yeah, and I think a lot of security education metrics often have a bit of a longer tail, but I think about not – I don't really care so much about the click rates for internal phishing campaigns, because again, anyone can fall for a phish if it's crafted correctly enough. If it's subtle enough, or if just somebody's distracted, or having a bad day, which we never have. It's not like there's a pandemic, or anything. But for things that are sort of numbers wise, I think about how much are people engaging with security teams not just in terms of reporting suspicious emails, but how often are they reporting ones that aren't a phishing simulation? How much are they working with security teams when they're building new features and what's the impact of that baseline level before there's, I don't know, formal process for security reviews, code reviews, threat modeling stuff in place? What does that story look like over time for the product and for product security? So I think there's quite a bit of narrative data involved in security education metrics. JOHN: Yeah. I mean you could look at inbound interests, like how often are you consulted out of the blue by another team, or even of the materials you've produced, what's the engagement rates on that? I think that's a lower quality one, but I think inbound interest would be fantastic. CASEY: Yeah. KAT: Yeah, exactly. I was thinking to some degree about well, what kinds of vulnerabilities are you shipping in your code? Because I think there's never 100% secure code. But I think if you catch some of the low-hanging fruits earlier on, then sometimes you get an interesting picture of like, okay, security is being infused into the SDLC at all of these various Swiss cheese checkpoints. So think about that to some degree and that's often more of a process thing than a purely an education thing, but getting an education is an enhancer to all of these other parts of the security programs. JOHN: So in the topics for the show that you had suggested to us, one of the things that stood out to me was something you called dietary accessibility. So can you tell me a little bit more about what that means? KAT: So earlier in this year, in the middle of all of this pandemic ridiculousness, I got diagnosed with celiac disease. Fortunately, I guess, if there was a time to be diagnosed with that, it's I'm working remotely and nobody's going out to eat really. Oh, I should back up. I think a lot of people know what it is, but just in case, it's an autoimmune disorder where my body attacks itself when I eat gluten. I've described it in the past as my body thinks that gluten is a nation state adversary named fancy beer. [laughter] Ding, one more for the pun counter. I don't know how many we're up to now. [laughs] CASEY: I have a random story about a diet I had to do for a while for my health. I have irritable bowel syndrome in my family and that means we have to follow over really strict diet called the low FODMAP diet. If your tummy hurts a lot, it's something you might look into because it's underdiagnosed. That meant I couldn't have wheat, but not because I had celiac disease; I was not allergic to the protein in wheat flour. I was intolerant to the starch and wheat flour. So it would bother me a lot. People said, “Do you have celiac, or?” And I was like, “No, but I cannot have wheat because the doctor told me so, but no, it's not an allergy.” I don't know, my logical brain did not like that question. [laughter] That was an invalid question. No, it's not a preference. I prefer to eat bread, but I cannot, or it hurts my body according to my doctor. KAT: [chuckles] So you can't have the starch and I can't have the protein. So together, we can just – [overtalk] CASEY: Separate it! KAT: Split all of the wheat molecules in the world and eat that. [laughs] CASEY: That's fair. I literally made gluten-free bread with gluten. [laughs] I got all the gluten-free starches and then the gluten from the wheat and I didn't have the starch in the wheat and it did not upset my stomach. KAT: Oh man. JOHN: Yeah. I've got a dairy sensitivity, but it's not lactose. It's casein so it's the protein in the dairy. CASEY: Protein, uh huh. KAT: Oh, interesting. CASEY: I apologize on behalf of all the Casey. [laughter] Casey in. KAT: Who let Casey in? CASEY: Ding! KAT: Ding! No, but it's made me think a lot about as I was – first of all, it's just I didn't fully appreciate until I was going through it firsthand, the amount of cognitive overload that just goes into living with it every day. [laughs] Speaking of constant state of hypervigilance, it took a while for that to make it through – I don't know, me to operationalize to my new life that's going to be my reality for the [laughs] rest of my life now because it was just like, “Oh, can I eat this? Can I eat that?” All of that. Something that at least helped ease me out of this initial overwhelm and grieving period was tying some of the stuff that I was dealing with back to how would I do this in my – how would I approach this if this were a security education and security awareness kind of thing? CASEY: Oh, yeah. KAT: Because it's a new concept and it's a thing that is unfamiliar and not everyone is an expert in it. so I'm like, “How would I treat myself as the person who's not an expert in it yet?” I, again, tried to get myself back to some of those same concepts of okay, let's not get stuck in thud mode, let's think about what are some of the actual facts versus what's scaremongering. I don't need to know how much my risk of colon cancer is increased, because that's not how helpful for me to actually be able to go about my day. I need to know what are the gluten-free brands of chips? That's critical infrastructure. CASEY: I love this parallel. This is so cool. KAT: And so I thought about to – I've mentioned earlier, decision fatigue as a security issue. I thought about how can I reduce the decision fatigue and not get stuck just reading all the labels on foods and stuff? What are the shortcuts I can take? Some of those were like okay, let me learn to recognize the labels of what the labels mean of a certified gluten-free logo and also just eat a lot of things that would never have touch gluten to begin with, like plain and raw meat, plain potatoes, plain vegetables, things like that. So just anything to take the cognitive load down a little bit, because it was never going to be zero. It's interesting. Sometimes, I don't know, I have tons of different interests and I've always interested in people's perspective outside of security. A lot of that stuff influences the way I think about security, but sometimes the way I think about security also ends up influencing other stuff in my life, so. CASEY: Yeah. I think that's brilliant. Use – [overtalk] KAT: And interesting to connect with those. CASEY: The patterns and you're comfortable with, and apply them. KAT: Exactly. CASEY: A lot of really cool ideas come from technology. KAT: Yeah, and go for harm reduction, not nothing because we don't live in a gluten-free world. It's like I can try to make myself as safe as possible, but at some point, my gut may suffer a data breach and [laughs] when I do, should be blameless and just work on getting myself recovered and trying – [overtalk] JOHN: Yeah. I mean, thinking about it as a threat model. There's this gluten out there and some of it's obvious, some of it's not obvious. What am I putting in place so that I get that 95th percentile, or whatever it is that you can think of it that way? I like that. KAT: Exactly. It's an interesting tie to threat modeling how the same people – even if people have the same thing that they can't eat, they may still have a different threat model. They may, like how we both had to avoid wheat, but for different reasons and with different side effects, if we eat it and things like that. CASEY: I love these parallels. I imagine you went into some of these in that talk at DisInfoSec. Is that right? KAT: Yeah. A little bit. So DisInfoSec, it's a virtual conference in its second year of existence, specifically highlighting disabled speakers in the InfoSec community run by Kim Crawley, who's a blogger for Hack the Box. There was a really interesting lineup of talks this year. Some people, I think about half of them touched on neurodiversity and various aspects of security through lenses of being autistic and ADHD, which is really cool. For mine, I focused on those of us who have disability-related dietary restrictions and how that affects our life in the tech workplace, where compared to a lot of other places I've worked, there's a lot of free food on the company dime hanging around and there's a lot of use of food as a way to build connection and build community. CASEY: Yeah, and a lot of stuff, a lot of people can't eat. I'm with you, uh huh. KAT: Yeah. I just took stock of all of the times that I would take people up for lunch interviews, go out to dinner with colleagues when they're in town, all of these things. Like snacks in the office. Just there not being a bathroom on the same floor as me for multiple jobs where I worked. [laughs] Things like that. So I really wanted to – the thing that I wanted to highlight in that talk in general was systemic level accommodations to be made for people with be they celiac IBS, food allergies, diabetes rather than relying on people individually requesting accommodations. This universal design model where you've got to make sure that your workplace is by default set up to accommodate people with a wide range of disabilities including dietary needs and a lot of times it doesn't come down to even feeding them. It comes down to making sure their health insurance is good, making sure people can work remotely, making sure that – [overtalk] CASEY: Higher levels of Swiss cheese on that. They are various levels. KAT: Yeah, the levels of Swiss cheese. A lot of stuff cascades from lunch interviews, making sure that if you do them at all, that you're really flexible about them. JOHN: Yeah. I can definitely relate to the being able to work from home, which I've done for the last decade, or more, has been huge for being able to have a solid control of my diet. Because it's really easy to have all the right things around for lunch rather than oh, I've only got half an hour, I can run out to the sub shop and I'll just deal with the consequences. Because that's what's nearby versus, or trying to bring food into the office and keep it in the fridge, or the free – that's a whole mess. So just like you said, good health insurance, working from home, these are things that allow for all sorts of different disabilities to be taken care of so well that you don't – that's the base, that's table stakes to formatting kind of inclusion. KAT: Exactly, exactly. CASEY: Yeah. KAT: Exactly. Yeah, and I think what sometimes gets missed is that even there are other things that I need to – the ability to just sometimes lay down, the ability to be close to a bathroom, and things that are not food related, but definitely are my reality. [laughs] CASEY: And companies went out, too. By accommodating you, they get all of your expertise and skills and puns. In exchange for flexibility, they get puns. KAT: [laughs] And I still make puns about gluten, wheat, rye, and barley even though I can I eat them anymore. That will never go away. CASEY: They just keep rising. KAT: Wheat for it. Wait for it. [laughter] CASEY: Ding! KAT: That's just my wry sense of humor. CASEY: All right. We're getting near end of time for today. This point, let's talk about reflections and plugs. JOHN: I can go first. I think the thing that's definitely sticking with me is thinking about the internal teams relating to other internal teams at a company as a marketing issue. Security is obviously one where you need to have that relationship with pretty much every team. But I'm thinking all sorts of all the way around development, DevOps, tech QA. Everyone can think this way and probably gain something from it as a what are we presenting to the rest of the company, what is our interface, and how do we bring more things to it such that people like working with our interface a lot so that we have great relationships with the rest of the team? I think I'm going to keep thinking about that for a while. CASEY: I'll share a reflection. I liked noticing that those phish emails can cause harm to people—they can feel bad and then make them less receptive. I've always been a fan of them overall. But thinking about that impact, I might have even been the one to say that, but it was still surprising to me when that came out of my mouth. Say, oh yeah, it hurts people in a way, too. We don't have to have that painful experience to teach people. It can be done in a safer environment. I wonder what else we can do for training of things like that to make it more positive and less negative. I'm going to be thinking on that. KAT: Yeah. And I wrote down AIDA. Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. Did I get that right? CASEY: Yeah. KAT: I'm definitely going to look into that. I think that's a great model for education of all kinds. CASEY: Yeah. If you want to go even deeper, there's like 6 and 7 tier models on the Wikipedia page links to a bunch of them. That's just the most common. KAT: Awesome. CASEY: For plugs, I just want to plug some homework for you all. Everyone listening, there's this Unconscious Bias Training That Works article that I've mentioned twice now. I hope you get to read that. And I guess, the AIDA – It'll be in the show notes for sure. And then the Wikipedia page for AIDA marketing just so you have a spot to look it up, if you forget about it. Try to apply that to situations, that's your homework. KAT: I think something I plugged on Twitter quite a bit over the years and a lot when we were talking about the language that we use earlier, I'm a huge fan of the Responsible Communication Style Guide, which was put out by the Recompiler, which is a feminist activist hacker publication. So they've got guides on words to avoid, words to use instead for when talking about race, gender, class, health, disability status. It's written for a tech audience and I really like that as a resource for using inclusive language. JOHN: Yeah. It's great stuff. CASEY: I love it. All right, thanks so much for are coming on our show today, Kat. Special Guest: Kat Sweet.

Love Your Work
269. Farm What You Forage

Love Your Work

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 25, 2021 12:29


Many people think our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived short and miserable lives. In fact, that's what most anthropologists thought. Until the 1960s, when they looked more closely at how foragers got by. The way foragers “worked” can tell us a lot about the way we, as creators, work. Farming gets a lot of output with little effort No one can be exactly sure when a human first planted a seed to grow food, but this one act was one of the most revolutionary in human history – up there with the invention of fire, or the internet. The agricultural revolution meant humans no longer needed to roam around, searching for food. But, with the innovation of agriculture came some trade-offs. We had to wait for our crops to grow, so we had to stay in one place. But staying in one place didn't work out-of-the-box everywhere. As anthropologist James Suzman points out in his book, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, the first successful cities sprouted up in floodplains. These areas flooded regularly, and that refreshed the nutrients in the soil, which was a must for successful farming, as crop-rotation hadn't yet been invented. Which brings us to another drawback of farming. Yes, farming gets you a lot of food with little effort, but eventually your once-fertile soil runs out of nutrients. Creative “farming” grows ideas into finished products As creatives, it's useful for us to “farm.” Plant seeds of ideas. Give them water, sunlight, and fertile soil, and eventually you'll have a crop of creative products to harvest. I talked in my book, Mind Management, Not Time Management, about “creative systems.” Cultivating ideas takes time. By working with the cycles of your energy to do short bursts of work, and letting incubation do the rest, you can always have creative products to ship. (I talked specifically about my creative system for Love Mondays newsletters on episode 260.) Creative farming is a great way to consistently turn ideas into finished products. But foraging is where you get the ideas in the first place. Foraging is more effective than you think In the 1960s, anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee lived with a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Kalahari desert. He carefully tracked what they spent time on, and what they got out of it. Lee found these tribes met all their needs for food in just fifteen hours work a week. They consumed well over the daily recommended intake of 2,000 calories, and they did it all without farming. They did it by foraging. Fifteen hours a week to get everything you need. That sounds appealing to many of us. Fifteen hours a week is ironically the number of hours economist John Maynard Keynes once predicted we in the industrial world would work. In 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, Keynes had the guts to predict that by 2030, we would at least quadruple our productivity. As a result, he said, we would work only fifteen hours a week. But foraging doesn't lead to progress We reached that quadruple-productivity mark way back in 1980. But we still work way more than fifteen hours a week. Why? We can make philosophical arguments about the hedonic treadmill, and how we buy too much junk. But one thing is for sure: We want to see “progress.” These hunter gatherer tribes, who have sadly been all but completely driven off their foraging land by the industrial world, did lead rich lives. They worked for what they needed, they had plenty of leisure time, and everything they did was deeply integrated with their families and communities. But they didn't have running water, electricity, or modern medicine. Many lived as long as anyone in the civilized world – if they reached adulthood. But they had a high infant-mortality rate, which pushed down the average lifespan. They didn't have what we consider “progress.” They didn't wonder if their children would live in a world with human flight, space exploration, or the internet. Each generation's life was essentially the same as the previous. Creatives need to forage As creatives, we can't just farm. We need to “forage,” too. We need to wander around, follow our curiosities, and see what surprises we can find. The hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari lived in such a rich ecosystem, they could always feel confident they could find something to eat if they went and looked for it. But as a creator, happening upon a feast is less common. It's not every day a song comes to us in our sleep, like it did when Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday.” Or that a happy accident occurs, like when Charles Goodyear spilled chemicals and developed vulcanized rubber. This is why you need to farm what you forage. Forage, then farm, to have great ideas, then make them real Farming what you forage isn't just a good way to do creative work. If you want to be consistent, it's the only way. This is hard to see, because we're working in a world that's a relic of the assembly line. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, and software developers, themselves, are produced on assembly lines. They follow curricula. They take exams. These exams have bubbles they fill out, so a machine can read them – as long as they're filled out with a number-two pencil. But, like farming, these professions grow stale, like soil being sapped of nutrients. The curricula have to change, as do the exams. But those curricula don't change from farming over and over. Someone has to farm what they forage, to change the field. Remember from episode 266 that for Henry Ford to put workers on the assembly line, he had to first farm what he foraged. It took a lot of experimentation and tinkering – from Model A to Model S, in addition to the work he did in two previous failed car companies – before the Model T was ready to be produced en masse. But the soil eventually got sapped of its nutrients. While Ford refused to change the Model T until sales dwindled, other car companies were farming what they foraged – innovating to build better cars. We're not used to farming what we forage. It's not how work has gotten done in recent history. But as automation and AI threaten more and more jobs, we're freed from the drudgery of just farming. We need to forage, too. I talked in episode 250 about how I farm what I forage with my digital Zettelkasten (that article has since expanded into a successful book by the same name). To forage, I explore what interests me – reading books, listening to podcasts, and having conversations. To farm, I take notes, then categorize and connect them. These seeds of ideas grow over time, until I'm ready to harvest them. An idea can grow into a tweet, then a newsletter, then a podcast episode, maybe eventually even a book. Farming = clock time; Foraging = event time Farming and foraging call for different ways of thinking about time, too. In episode 235, I talked about the difference between “clock time,” and “event time.” Clock time's most recent roots come from Frederick Taylor's scientific management. Breaking actions down to split seconds was a big departure for farmers who moved to cities to work in industry. But farming, too, was a likely predecessor of clock time. Foragers could usually be confident that if they were hungry, they could find something to eat. When you live in a diverse ecosystem, if one thing is not doing so well, something else is. In fact, when Richard Borshay Lee was studying foragers, there was a drought. The nearby farmers couldn't grow crops. To survive, they had to rely on outside food aid. The tribe he was studying did not. They got by on foods they had found in the wild. When you're farming, you can't count on finding food whenever you're hungry. You have to grow it. So, you have to think carefully about time. If you don't plant your seeds, pull weeds, or water crops today, you'll be hungry a long time from now. This is probably one reason cultures close to the equator tend to think more about the present, whereas cultures in climates with changing seasons think more about the future. When surviving tomorrow depends upon what you do today, you think ahead. If you focus too much on farming, you'll always be on clock time. If you keep planting the same seeds and growing the same crops, your soil will become sterile. If you focus too much on foraging, you'll always be on event time. If you only rely on what you find in the wild, you'll always be living hand-to-mouth. You'll be waiting a long time between one idea and the next, and you'll struggle to develop them into finished products. Find a seed with potential, then plant it To farm what you forage, make space to wander. Follow your curiosity, even when it feels as if it will take you nowhere. But when you find something interesting that might have potential, plant the seed. Build creative systems that help you keep ideas growing, without sapping your soil. If you do those two things, you'll never have famines, and always have feasts. Image: Southern Gardens, Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/farm-forage/

Tommies & Jerries
12. Exorcising Hitler

Tommies & Jerries

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 24, 2021 56:20


This week's episode investigates the dark origins of post-war Germany. Did the victorious Brits help or hinder their former enemies in the difficult process of denazification? Katja and Oliver are joined by the historian and bestselling author Frederick Taylor. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Conversations About Collaboration
Episode 52: Despotic Taylorism With Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal

Conversations About Collaboration

Play Episode Play 30 sec Highlight Listen Later Nov 2, 2021 22:36


Christopher Mims joins me today. He is a tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal. His new book is Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door—Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy. We talk about logistics, the long-term impact of COVID-19 on the supply chain, labor differences between Amazon and UPS, Frederick Taylor, and when things will go back to normal. Support the show

The Majority Report with Sam Seder
2699 - Artificial Intelligence: The Technology of Extraction w/ Kate Crawford

The Majority Report with Sam Seder

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2021 76:10


Sam and Emma host Kate Crawford, Research Professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg, to discuss her recent book Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, on our relationship with big tech, and the concept of the AI industry as a continuation of the extractive practices and power dynamics in the workplace that we have been building for centuries. They start off with a discussion on how Professor Crawford got into AI, and how her perspective on it has changed, from the view of the industry as one defined by algorithmic capacity and data infrastructure to an industry of extraction and exploitation, jump-started by diving into the stages of production from lithium mines to Amazon fulfillment warehouses to labs. Getting into the abstraction and depoliticization of artificial intelligence, Professor Crawford explores how Big Tech has become perhaps the most concentrated industry since the railroads, hiding behind an ideology of technocratic utopianism that has built a fear of regulation, a consolidation of power, and a growing perspective that it is essential to our way of life. Next, she, Emma, and Sam dive into the relationship between AI and labor practices, looking at the hyper “efficiency” created by workplace algorithms (e.g. at Amazon warehouses) as a revolutionary progression of Frederick Taylor's factory ideology, and exploring how this disembodied management serves to hamper organizing, particularly with the effect of the bias to believe technology. They then move onto the importance of highlighting the overlap of the surveillance state and corporate surveillance, this creation of a multi-headed hydra, and why the American public only sees the state as a threat, before expanding on the surveillance apparatus are already working to reinforce power structures that have exceeded regulation, looking particularly at the Police state and counter-terrorism measures. They wrap up the interview by discussing the future of regulation in the industry and the impact anti-trust measures could have (and why that won't be enough). Sam and Emma read some Majority Reporter updates on the mass unionization efforts going on in the US, and discuss Manchin's posturing with Bernie (physically). And in the Fun Half: Nomiki Konst joins Sam and Emma as they cover the New York democratic machine getting blindsided by a democratic socialist woman of color taking on an established incumbent, inspiring Chuck Schumer to take a break from politics, Chris Leal for TX House District #114 gives some updates on his campaign, and the MR crew discusses the judgments of Meghan McCain in the workplace for simply acting the part she's paid for. They also cover the silencing of Bari Weiss with her free airtime on CNN, Dan Bongino's poor connection in the Glenn Greenwald telephone game, plus, your calls and IMs! Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here. Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ (Merch issues and concerns can be addressed here: majorityreportstore@mirrorimage.com) You can now watch the livestream on Twitch Check out today's sponsors: Podium makes doing business as easy as sending a text. All your employees can text from a single inbox, offering a smoother experience for your customers. Whether you're answering questions, collecting reviews, scheduling appointments and deliveries or dealing with payment collection – all you have to do is just send a text. Stay ahead of the competition with Podium – they have free plans for growing businesses, plus all the power growing businesses need to scale. Get started free today at Podium.com/MAJORITY. LiquidIV: The hot summer months are here and we need to be proactive to keep our body fueled up & hydrated. Liquid I.V. contains 5 essential vitamins—more Vitamin C than an orange and as much potassium as a banana. Healthier than sugary sports drinks, there are no artificial flavors or preservatives and less sugar than an apple. Grab your Liquid I.V. in bulk nationwide at Costco or you can get 25% off when you go to liquidIV.com and use code MAJORITYREP at checkout. That's 25% off ANYTHING you order when you get better hydration today using promo code MAJORITYREP at liquidIV.com. Shopify: Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. Shopify is here to help, with tools and resources that make it easy for any business to succeed from down the street to around the globe. Shopify powers over 1.7 million businesses - from first-sale to full-scale. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business - so upstarts, start-ups, and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in-person sales, and effortlessly stay informed. Go to shopify.com/majority, for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features! Support the St. Vincent Nurses today as they continue to strike for a fair contract! https://action.massnurses.org/we-stand-with-st-vincents-nurses/ Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Subscribe to AM Quickie writer Corey Pein's podcast News from Nowhere, at https://www.patreon.com/newsfromnowhere Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! Subscribe to Matt's other show Literary Hangover on Patreon! Check out The Letterhack's upcoming Kickstarter project for his new graphic novel! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/milagrocomic/milagro-heroe-de-las-calles Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel! Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! Check out The Nomiki Show live at 3 pm ET on YouTube at patreon.com/thenomikishow Check out Jamie's podcast, The Antifada, at patreon.com/theantifada, on iTunes, or at twitch.tv/theantifada (streaming every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 7pm ET!) Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop Donate to Chris in Dallas's campaign for the Texas State House here!

accessAtlanta: Things to do in Atlanta
Interview with Buckhead-based filmmaker Frederick Taylor

accessAtlanta: Things to do in Atlanta

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2021 50:59


Buckhead-based filmmaker Frederick Taylor is very busy. He screened one of his films at the Cannes Film Festival this summer, and he'll have films showing at both the Out on Film festival in Atlanta and the North Georgia Film Festival this fall. And he's still working on more new projects. Felicia Feaster spoke with Taylor recently and she'll bring us that conversation.

Engines of Our Ingenuity
Engines of Our Ingenuity 2686: Frank and Lillian Moller Gilbreth

Engines of Our Ingenuity

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 19, 2021 3:47


Episode: 2686 The Story of Frank and Lillian Moller Gilbreth.  Today, cheaper by the dozen.

Data Gurus
The Future of Work Part Two | Ep. 139

Data Gurus

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 6, 2021 21:24


Welcome to Part Two of an exciting two-part series on the future of work. Today, Sima continues her conversation with Kelly Monahan, the Thought Leadership Research Principal Director at Accenture Research. In this episode, Kelly and Sima discuss the different models that companies are considering, to bring people back into the office, create hybrid models, or go completely remote. Going back to the traditional model Some employers think they might encourage their employees to go back to the traditional model by compensating them with higher pay. Others are considering paying their employees less if they do not return to the office. A rational economic move Incentivizing people to work in less than preferred conditions was a rational economic move that was popular in the late 1970s. Henry Ford was a master of that tactic. In the short term In the short term, there will be a segment prepared to work in terms of an incentive to maintain an old paradigm. In the long run In the long run, however, it will not work. Incentivizing people to work in less than preferred conditions is a dangerous strategy because once the financial incentive reaches a certain amount, people's motivation for work drops dramatically. They will start seeking out situations where they feel dignified and can have meaningful engagements with their coworkers. The leadership experience It is all about the leadership experience. Under poor leadership, people will leave eventually, regardless of how much they earn, because it compromises their ability to be human. Industrial and organizational psychology Kelly has been studying the future of work for the last seven years. It frustrates her to see how little industrial and organizational psychology and behavioral science gets brought into leadership decision-making and boardrooms. Understanding more  Kelly feels that if we understood more about how people behave, what incentivizes them, and what matters to them, we would have very different organizations today. An old model Our philosophical assumptions in the business realm have not become updated. The focus in MBA business administration and how people get taught to lead in organizations is based on four principles: planning, organizing, directing, and leading resources. That is an old model that no longer works today. In the past Even in the past, those four principles did not create an ideal model. The labor strikes back in the 1920s and 1930s prove that. The government outlawed Frederick Taylor's way of doing business because it was considered a dehumanized method. Yet, today, our MBA programs are still anchored in that method. New leaders Some new leaders are doing things very differently from what they have inherited and learned. They have decided to work more humanly, even though it becomes more difficult as a business scales. For a business to scale The further you get from your employee population, the harder it is to have human kindness, compassion, and dignity because those qualities become transactional for a business to scale. The question we need to ask In the future of work, we need to ask ourselves what our success metric will be. A new leadership playbook In the future of the digital economy, hypergrowth, innovation, creativity, and creating environments where people can do things differently will scale. That will require a new leadership playbook. The digital economy A digital economy requires a complete change in the skill sets that people have. So we need to create long runways in our organizations to do that without leaving anyone behind. Creating value In today's digital economy, people and organizations need to be as intelligent as possible to create value. To get to intelligence, organizations will have to invest in research and development, innovation, and upskilling programs. Reframing education systems Children should learn how to be curious.

The VERY UNofficial AICP Study Guide Podcast
Episode 28: In the Future, the System Must Be First

The VERY UNofficial AICP Study Guide Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2021 14:39


In the future, the system must be first.  At least, that's what Frederick Taylor thought when he devised his Scientific Management theory that ended up kicking off the City Efficient Movement. Efficient?  Maybe.  But was it all unicorns, roses, and rainbows?   The Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principles_of_Scientific_Managementhttps://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/scientific-management/ Technical Advisory Corporation (First private planning consulting firm in 1913)http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sdbest/up594/people/Gbford.htm Harland Bartholomew (First full-time employee 1914):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harland_Bartholomewhttps://tclf.org/pioneer/harland-bartholomewhttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10999922.2017.1306902?journalCode=mpin20

Sunday Letters
The Gnömic: Fear & Work

Sunday Letters

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2021 11:18


I’m going to mix things up here a little bit mid-week. A poem, a sketch, a cartoon, a thought, an artist who has something interesting to say about daily work and so on. You won’t know what you’re getting until you’ve got it. Remove the predictability a little bit you might say. Let’s see where it goes…I’ve been reading and listening to David Lynch recently. Here’s what he says about fear and work;“When people are in fear they don't want to go to work. So many people today have that feeling. Then fear starts turning into hate and they begin to hate going to work… If I ran my set with fear, I would get 1%, not 100%, of what I get. And there would be no fun going down the road together.” - David LynchI think the challenge is to be easy about it rather than forceful. I was forceful with my people the whole time. I pushed hard and watched their every move. It’s stifling under that kind of scrutiny. Of course, there have to be standards, and the industry is filled with people with bad habits and poor training who don’t want to improve, to keep higher standards. But that’s the problem when you operate in a game where others decide what your work should look like–you don’t get to be truly creative and so there’s a certain resentment. In a game where the rules are set and people’s creativity is taken from them, they lose their power if indeed they even felt it in the first place. They become disenfranchised and demotivated. There’s no incentive to apply themselves. Ok, there might be a pay packet at the end of the week, but people aren’t motivated by money, not really.The game is rigged. Humans are robots in the machine of production and consumption. Ever since Frederick Taylor made scientific management a thing, people’s creativity and intuition have been dampened, even removed completely. You could argue that this change came about through industrialisation. Today, instead of being able to think for oneself, to be creative and self-expressive, work has become a measurable and quantifiable exercise where your merit and reward is linked to how many widgets you can make in a minute, an hour, a day, a week. It’s the same in services'; you’ve got to be representative of what the company deems appropriate. Whatever happens, you certainly cannot be yourself.There’s no love in that. It’s fear-based the whole way. No wonder people hate their work. My guess is that most people don’t even know there’s something better because all they’ve experienced is the dry and inhospitable contemporary workplace. A desert, you might say. That’s how I operated for years even though something in me knew that nothing would grow there, I kept pushing. Inputs and outputs, soulless shit. Planting seeds in the sand and none of them growing.Operate in this dry and inhospitable place if you must, but understand that for you and those who work under your command, your output must exceed input. If it doesn’t, the game will fail you and you’ll fail the game. Also know that at some point in that input-output game, you may feel disillusioned and unfulfilled. You also might not. It depends where you derive your sense of fulfilment, and indeed, how thin that is.Fear is not a sustainable promoter of growth. It might bring about short-term gain but it sacrifices people in the process. We call it burnout in psychological research terms. It’s ok though, there are always more and more willing to join the long line willing to sacrifice themselves and their potential for a fulfilling creative life for an ideal, not of their own making. Ideas of David Lynch and his kind keep me on track. It pays to read this guy.“Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole. If you keep your eye on the doughnut and do your work, that’s all you can control. You can’t control any of what’s out there, outside yourself. But you can get inside and do the best work you can do.” - David LynchWhat’s the alternative? Find a way out. Read and watch people (there are plenty hiding in plain sight) that do the opposite, who follow a different road. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sundayletters.larrygmaguire.com/subscribe

Sunday Letters
203 Fear & Work

Sunday Letters

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2021 16:09


Support Sunday Letters; https://sundayletters.larrygmaguire.com I think the challenge is to be easy about it rather than forceful. I was forceful with my people the whole time. I pushed hard and watched their every move. It's stifling under that kind of scrutiny. Of course, there have to be standards, and the industry is filled with people with bad habits and poor training who don't want to improve, to keep higher standards. But that's the problem when you operate in a game where others decide what your work should look like–you don't get to be truly creative and so there's a certain resentment. In a game where the rules are set and people's creativity is taken from them, they lose their power if indeed they even felt it in the first place. They become disenfranchised and demotivated. There's no incentive to apply themselves. Ok, there might be a pay packet at the end of the week, but people aren't motivated by money, not really. The game is rigged. Humans are robots in the machine of production and consumption. Ever since Frederick Taylor made scientific management a thing, people's creativity and intuition have been dampened, even removed completely. You could argue that this change came about through industrialisation. Today, instead of being able to think for oneself, to be creative and self-expressive, work has become a measurable and quantifiable exercise where your merit and reward is linked to how many widgets you can make in a minute, an hour, a day, a week. It's the same in services'; you've got to be representative of what the company deems appropriate. Whatever happens, you certainly cannot be yourself. Read the full article; https://sundayletters.larrygmaguire.com/p/the-gnomic-fear-and-work --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sunday-letters/message

The Informed Life
Alla Weinberg on Work Culture

The Informed Life

Play Episode Listen Later May 23, 2021 29:40 Transcription Available


Alla Weinberg helps teams and organizations improve the quality of relationships at work. She has a background in design, but now calls herself a ‘work relationship expert.' In this conversation, we discuss her new book, A Culture of Safety, and how teams can create environments that allow people to do their best work together. Listen to the show Download episode 62 Show notes @IamAllaW on Twitter Alla Weinberg on LinkedIn Spoke & Wheel (Alla's consulting company) A Culture of Safety: Building a work environment where people can think, collaborate and innovate by Alla Weinberg Scientific Management (Taylorism) Frederick Winslow Taylor Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Alla, welcome to the show. Alla: Thank you so much for having me. Jorge: Well, I'm excited to have you on the show. For folks who might not know you. Can you please introduce yourself? About Alla Alla: Hi everyone! My name is Alla Weinberg. I consider myself a work relationship expert, and I work with team leaders to create trusting teams and cultures of safety. Jorge: I think that you are the first work relationship expert I've met. What does that entail? Alla: That entails looking at and mapping — actually creating visual maps — of how people relate to each other at work. And when I say relate, I mean think, feel, and behave, towards each other. And I do that for a team, and I create visual maps so the team can visualize their own dynamics and see what's working relationally on a team and what's not working, with the thought that seeing something, making the invisible visible, you can improve it. Even if it's not... it doesn't necessarily have to be anything's going wrong. It can be just how can we even be better at working together at relating to each other so that we can, as a team, use our collective intelligence, you know, to serve the work that we're doing to serve the company in the greater purpose that we have as a team. Jorge: Are you brought into organizations by people in the human resources department? Alla: I'm usually brought in by team leaders. So, a leader of a business org, or even a smaller team. And because of my design background, I generally have been brought in by design leaders to talk to, and to work with design teams specifically. Relationships Jorge: Okay How did you come from design to this field of human relationships? Alla: Yeah. I was a designer and a researcher for about 10 years, and I got to a place in my career where I didn't feel satisfied and happy. It wasn't quite a fit for what I wanted to do. And I hired a coach for myself — a life coach — to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and my career. And through that I learned, "Oh, I actually want to do this thing — this coaching thing! I want to do that for designers." And so, I went and I got trained to do it. I got certified to do our… took a lot of courses in it. And through actually a lot of trial and error, I sort of designed my way into this career. Because at first, I just did, you know, career coaching for designers. And then I did leadership coaching for design leaders, and I still do some of that. And eventually I got to the place where I noticed what is the thing that really matters to me? What are the conversations that I keep having over and over again with people and it always has to do with relationships? You know, I'm having trouble with somebody that's reporting to me. Or I'm having trouble with my leader. We're not getting along. They don't understand me. They don't hear me. You know, oftentimes in the design field people are like how do we get a seat at the table? Well, a lot of that has to do with relationships. What kind of relationships do people have with senior leadership? And, you know, also design having relationships, often tense relationships, with other cross-functional teams, right? Development, product management, et cetera. And I noticed that that's just what I deeply care about, and I want to change in the world. But also reflecting on my own career as a designer, that's where I felt like that was missing for me. That was a lot of where I felt unsatisfied in my career. I wanted better relationships at work. I wanted deeper relationships at work. And now I want to help others do the same so that we can do great work together. It's not just for touchy, feely reasons. It's so people can have access to their full intelligence and do great work together. And relationships are a big part of that. So I kind of got there through a lot of trying different things and being like "no, not quite it!" And landing here finally. And this is... honestly, last year in 2020, because of COVID and having a lot of time to reflect, I finally landed in this place where like... yeah, like I'm a full, yes! This is definitely what I want to be doing. And this is what I want to be focusing on. Jorge: Well, congratulations. I'm sure that's a very satisfying feeling. It sounds like you've found your thing. What I heard there is that you're usually brought in by team leaders. Are they bringing you in because they have spotted some kind of dysfunction in their team or that things could be going better? Alla: That's usually the case. What usually happens is a team leader will see some kind of engagement results, like an engagement survey within an organization, that's showing that the design team specifically, or just their team if it's not that design team, is... the engagement scores are low and also that maybe trust is low and psychological safety is low, on the team. There may also be times when I'm brought in because the team isn't quite... there is a lot of tension or there's a lot of things that aren't being said to the leader themselves. So like the leader isn't seeing the work. People are afraid to show work to them and they're seeing it too late. Or they're in a meeting like, you know, a staff meeting, and nobody's talking. There's crickets. I was recently brought in to work with a design ops team, where not... I mean, the team is actually great and they get along well with each other. They have great relationships with each other, but when they come together as a group: crickets! Like, there's no contributions. Nothing! They're not talking, they're not having the conversations that need to be had. People aren't questioning things. People aren't pushing on things. How can things be better? There's just nothing. And so the leader brought me in to say, "okay, well what's going on here? I don't even understand! What's going on here?" And so this is where visualizing the team dynamics and also doing exercises that help build team trust and safety come into play so that people start to feel okay to speak up, but it'll even have an invitation about what do we speak up about specifically. So, even knowing that is important. A Culture of Safety Jorge: You spoke of psychological safety and trust as two of the goals — if I might call them goals — of the work. One of the reasons why you're on the show now is that you've just published a book on this subject, and I was hoping that you would tell us a bit about the book. Alla: The book is really about, again, as a team leader, how you can create safety on your team. And in the book, I go beyond just psychological safety. I talk about three different types of safety, which is physical safety, emotional safety, and then psychological safety. And those three different types of safety map neurologically to how we, as human beings, are wired. So first, as a human being, I need to know... and this is more of like, my nervous system needs to know, that I'm physically safe. My physical body and my life is not in danger and feel relaxed around that. And before I can even have psychological safety, I need to know my body safe. So, my body is safe and then next I need to know I'm emotionally safe. It's okay to have all my feelings. It's okay to express my feelings. It's safe to connect emotionally to another human being. That I won't be hurt or that the relationship won't end. And then when I feel relaxed and safe there, then and only then can I achieve psychological safety, which is, "I feel okay and relaxed to share ideas, to contradict somebody to disagree, to take a risk," in that sense. And so, in the book, I talk about very practical ways how a team leader can start to create first physical safety, then emotional safety, then psychological safety. Jorge: That distinction is central to the book. It does come across. And I had a question about physical safety, because the way that you've explained it now is very clear to me. I'm almost picturing like Maslow's Pyramid... Alla: Heirarchy, right. Jorge: Yeah, where there's a baseline, and the baseline in this case is physical safety. This idea that I am not in fear for life and limb, right? At a minimum, I'm going to come to work and feel like, I'm going to be able to leave intact by the — physically intact — by the end of the day. I highlighted a passage in the book where you say that you define physical safety as the shared belief that everybody is valued, respected, and included. And that... I was having a hard time distinguishing between that and psychological safety. So, first of all, I'm wondering if I'm reading it right? Alla: Right. So, there's a little difference here. It's like where every body — meaning physical body. I think there's a little typo actually in the book, from the publisher. But it meant to be two words. 'Every body' meaning physical body is valued, respected, and included. Jorge: That makes a lot of sense, and this is an incredible example of how one small punctuation issue changes the meaning of a phrase. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because then it does speak to this idea that we are talking about this, you know, my physical matter at work here. Alla: And then the important thing about this — about physical safety specifically — it's not a conscious process for us in the way that our brain works. It's not that people are sitting there often consciously being afraid of their physical selves. Although sometimes if they're feeling microaggressions or really, you know, underrepresented in the workforce, that may be even a conscious feeling. But a lot of times it's unconscious and our nervous system, especially our autonomic nervous system, which is in charge of rest and digestion and heart rate and all of that. So, all of those unconscious functions that we have, it's taking in information from all our five senses, all of the time. That's called neuroception. So, our nervous system is taking in this information and it's constantly... all it's doing is constantly checking. "Am I safe? Is my body physically safe?" And it cannot tell the difference between a lion out there or an angry boss. It cannot tell the difference. To the body, the signal is, "oh no, my physical body is in danger." But if we even take it one step further, if let's say your job is at stake because you look different or you have different abilities, or there's something physically different about you, then the majority of the people in your workforce and your job is at stake as a result of that, and you have fear around losing your job as a result of that, that still impacts physical safety, because your ability to financially provide for yourself and take care of your physical needs, right? Shelter, food, clothing, et cetera, is impacted by your body. And so that's all still part of ensuring physical safety. Jorge: My expectation would be that... and I have to say it like this because I don't feel I've ever personally felt this way in work environment and can only imagine how detrimental it would be to feel threatened. But I would imagine that it creates a vicious cycle where if you don't feel like you can trust the environment that would lead you to — I'm going to use the word underperform — in various ways, which would perpetuate the perception that somehow you're not contributing as much, right? Alla: Exactly. And what I found in my research when writing the book, and I think this was one of my biggest aha's, but also my personal experience as well, is that, when I have not felt safe in an environment, and that can be in any of the three levels of safety? So physically, emotionally, or psychologically, I found in research that our operating IQ — so our ability to think, to analyze, to be creative, to form, you know, rational thoughts — drops by half. So, if my normal operating IQ is, let's say, at a hundred points, when I don't feel safe in an environment, it drops to 50. And this is again, a very human biological thing because our body and our brain will take resources away from our frontal cortex, which is where we think, and it will redistribute it to other parts to keep us alive, to keep us safe. And so, we can't perform at our best, because we can't think at our best when we don't have that level of safety. And so, this is why to me, this is absolutely foundational to any team. Before you can talk about high-performance, before you can talk about velocity of a team, before you can talk about creativity or innovation, first the safety has to exist so that people have access to their intelligence. And then collectively as a team have access to their collective intelligence and be able to, you know, complete the purpose or perform in the way that the company or the team is looking to do. Evaluating safety Jorge: How do you evaluate the degree of safety in an environment? Alla: I usually do it in a qualitative way where I will interview team members. And I look at two specific dimensions. I look at the dimension that I call power. Which is, are there practices, rituals, meetings, places and spaces for people to relate in a way that drives action forward? So, are there times where we as a team talk about direction, purpose, leadership, strategy... those kinds of things. Are we having those conversations? When are those conversations happening? How often are they happening and how do they go? How do those conversations go? And then the second dimension I look at is love. So, do we have conversations about just our own struggles? Our own humanity? The pain that we're going through as human beings. Do we talk about diversity? Do we talk about how we communicate with each other and what can be improved? So, I look at the types of conversations that people are having and how those conversations are going. How well are they happening? Because those are the meeting points where people relate to each other. That's how people relate to each other. And so, if there's a deficiency in either dimension, it's going to create a specific dynamic within a group. Jorge: These are two words that when I consider them in the context of the work environment: raise... the listeners to the show can't see my eyebrows shooting up when you say 'power' and 'love.' How is that received inside organizations using this terminology? Alla: I use it very intentionally to be provocative. So, it usually elicits some kind of emotional reaction from people, but it also creates an opening to discuss about what's really going on. And I feel like those are two dimensions of relationship — of relating. And so, yeah, I don't think it's an easy pill to swallow — for anyone. But I also think this is where we as organizations need to go. Like, we need to start having these conversations and start talking about love, at work, and start talking about power, at work. All of those exist or don't exist at work anyway. I'm just being very direct and naming it. And maybe that's my Russian coming through, but I'm just being direct about it and naming, "hey, like these things are in play. Let's look at them directly and talk about them directly." Jorge: I can imagine someone whose mindset about work is all about performance and all about optimization of resources, whether they be financial resources, people's time, that sort of thing. And I would imagine that for somebody like that, this idea that we need to have spaces dedicated to love in the work context might feel... I was going to use the word in tension with... let's say that, in tension with, the M.O. of, "this is business and we're just going to go for it and go for it at max speed." I mean, I don't know if you've encountered that type of situation, but how do you deal with that kind of environment? Alla: I guess in that environment, it just shows me the maturity level of people's understanding of basically how people work together and that it's still in an early stage of maturing. And those kinds of beliefs are held over beliefs from the industrial era, especially Taylorism. I was trying to remember the word. Especially Taylorism! Taylorism... basically Frederick Taylor came up with this model in the industrial era, that managers are the ones that come up with the ideas, and workers are the ones that execute on those ideas. They don't have to think they just execute on the ideas. And that may have worked to some degree on an assembly line, but no longer holds true. But with it comes this belief that strips people — that strips workers, employees — of their humanity. There are no longer humans. They're resources. that need to perform like machines, right? So, there's a specific worldview and the work that we're trying to do, and the work in the companies I often consult with, you know, tech companies, fintech companies, those kinds of spaces... even healthcare! Workers now have to think! We have to solve problems. There is so much complexity that's no longer a manager can tell employees, “Just do this thing," and they just go execute and do it. They have to think and be able to problem solve. So, if a team leader or manager wants their team to move fast, wants their team to be able to solve complex problems, wants their team to have access to their intelligence... all the things that they're wanting, all the outcomes that they're wanting, this performance outcome that they're wanting, to get there, the team needs to feel safe in working together. So, they need to know how to work together well. We can no longer assume people are working by themselves on an assembly line, just doing their one task and then passing it onto the next person. We have to collaborate with each other. We all work in teams and cross-functional teams, right? And so, in order for that to be effective, we have to build trust as human beings for that to happen. And again, as I mentioned, biologically, having that safety allows people to be able to have access to their full operating IQ. And it's no longer wasted on anxiety, worrying about what should I say/not say, feeling scared if I'm going to get fired if I don't do something or I do something, working around somebody... like, I've had many times in my career relationships at work that were very distressing to me. That weren't working, kept me up at night, you know, I didn't sleep well. I was anxious. I often cried because of it. I didn't know how to fix it. But then what I did was avoid the person. I worked around them. Tried to not meet with them. That creates so many blockages, to getting the work done, to getting the outcomes, that let's say a rational person is wanting. This is why I feel so passionate about relationships and focusing on relationships. Because when that is working, everything else works. Like the work actually happens and you get all the things that leaders want. You get the speed, you get the quality, you get the innovation, you get the creativity. All of it. So, I guess to me, it's like, that's the how. Like, if you want that, this is the, how. It is what I'm proposing. Jorge: There's a quote that you cite towards the end of the book from John Augustus Shedd. It says, "a ship is safe in a harbor, but that's not what ships are made for." Alla: I love that one. Creating a culture of safety Jorge: I loved it too. I wrote that down because that was great. And in the spirit of encouraging our listeners to be seaworthy vessels some sort, what can folks do to be more effective at helping create a culture of safety in their teams and their organizations. Alla: I love this question because it will touch on two things. One is if we look at it from an information architecture standpoint, what folks can do to create a culture of safety is to see what categories, what types of conversations to evaluate, that are happening on their team. And that are not happening on their team. Oftentimes, people will have many types of conversations and meetings about the work, very tactical conversations. Are you having conversations about humanity, about your struggles, about getting to know each other as human beings at a deeper level? Are you having conversations where you do bring up tensions? Where do you bring up conflict? Very intentionally, you have space to process tensions, process conflict, and have space for those conversations. Are you having conversations where people can — and especially leaders — can express mistakes and admit mistakes? And apologize for them and learn from them together. So, from a categorization perspective, what are the conversations you're having and not having as a team? So, you just evaluate that. What's the balance of that? Maybe you have some conversations about tactics, about strategy and some about humanity and struggles and who we are as people. And maybe you're having more of one or the other. And the goal here isn't that you have to have all the conversations all the time, but that there's a balance. That you're balancing doing the work with talking about who we are as people and how we do the work. And in the book, I recommend several types of meetings — structures — that people can then start to have those different types of conversations: talking about how folks are feeling, talking about what our boundaries are — our physical boundaries are — with each other, as a team. You know, talking about mistakes, talking about what our hopes and fears are for a project that we're about to kick off. What kind of conversations are you having? So, really, really start to think about that and take a sort of self-evaluation even, of that. And then there's that question of, you know, how do I know what to say? What's okay to say? How do I not offend anyone? When you have that level of safety with people, like you will know you'll have safety because you as an individual and wholly, as a team will feel relaxed that you're not worried about offending somebody because you know, you have a strong enough relationship with this person that they can say to you, "that really offended me." And you can say, "wow, you know? I did hurt you. I feel that. I'm sorry." And that can be the conversation you have. Or somebody can say, "wow, I really disagree with you here. I think we're going in the completely wrong direction!" And you can feel safe enough to engage in a... and I even suggested in the book, to have a little sparring meeting, you know? Where you have that creative tension, where you say, "okay, let's try to really deeply understand each other and where we're coming from and how we got to our stance so that we can find a third way — a creative way — to solve this problem. That's not my way. And it's not your way. It's the third way." And so, safety actually creates and allows for space, for tension, for correction, for repair. In every relationship, there's a cycle of connection, disconnection, reconnection. And what we are completely missing in the workplace right now are spaces for connecting to each other, speaking about times we are disconnected with each other and having opportunities to repair and reconnect with each other, as individuals and as a team as well. Closing Jorge: Well Alla, thank you so much for making the space for us to have this conversation and connect. Where can folks follow up with you? Alla: They can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter. My Twitter handle is @IamAllaW and then my website, spokeandwheel.co (dot. co) Jorge: And where can folks find the book? Alla: It's on Amazon. So, just search Culture Of Safety on Amazon. Jorge: Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for being with us, Alla: Thank you!

Warfare
The British People and the Outbreak of World War Two

Warfare

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2021 23:21


Our traditional understanding of the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 hinges on studies of Chamberlain and his fellow statesmen, but what about the general population? Frederick Taylor's latest book, 1939: A People's History (The War Nobody Wanted), details the reactions and fears of ordinary British and German people in the face of the slide to war, between the Munich Crisis of September 1938 and Hitler's invasion of Poland a little under a year later. In this episode, he and Dan discuss whether the British people were ready for war. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

American Lean Weekday: Leadership | Lean Culture & Intrapreneurship | Lean Methods | Industry 4.0 | Case Studies

Since it's near the end of the year and your company might consider Lean training for next year, I thought I'd give you an early present and cover what to include in your Lean training. This is not an exhaustive list and I'm going to break this up over several weeks. I'll cover more topics through the end of the year. So stay tuned! If you cover these topics, I know you will have a very solid start in educating employees on Lean topics that will benefit your company immensely! It's helpful to add workshops for many of these topics to keep people excited and engaged when we can all get into a training room again! 1. Lean HistoryPeople need to know Lean isn't something new. It wasn't invented by Toyota. You can trace the roots of Lean to Frederick Taylor, who understood if you divide work evenly among multiple people, you can produce a product quicker than one person building the item can. This was in the late 1800s. Henry Ford used that concept to build millions of cars and it revolutionized the auto industry. Today Lean is used in many industries, from hospitals and financial services to manufacturing. Don't spend too much time on this, just provide some background. 2. Value-added and Non-value-added workSomething the customer will pay for is value-added work. Just about everything else is waste. The entire goal of Lean is to identify and eliminate waste from processes. Not eliminate people. When companies say they don't have time to work on eliminating waste, it's because they spend too much time conducting nonvalue-added activities. Rework, building scrap, dispositioning scrap, looking for things, traveling, etc. When you eliminate the waste, you do less firefighting. 3. The Eight WastesNow that you've mentioned waste within processes, it's time to introduce the eight wastes. Put these in this order so they spell the mnemonic DOWNTIME. Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Not Listening to People's Ideas (N), Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Excess Processing. Have employees identify wastes in their areas that fall into these categories. This gets them thinking. Write them down on a flip chart. 4. 6S6S is a cleaning and organizing method. Each step begins with the letter S. Sort, Shine, Set-in-place, Standardize, and Sustain. This is a key Lean method and where many companies begin their Lean journey. The key to drive this home is to show pictures of areas that have gone through the 6S process. Share before and after pictures. Show pictures of what a mess the area was before and what it looks like after everything is in its place. You can discuss if your company will conduct 6S audits or use a better method, which I will share in a later blog. Next week I will cover more on what to include in your Lean training. As always, it is an honor to serve you, and I hope that you and your company are getting better every day! http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1499224100 (Rate and Review Here) More show notes are https://americanlean.com/blog/what-to-include-in-your-lean-training-part-1/ (here) https://americanlean.com/contact/ (Schedule a free 1/2 call) with Tom Reed.https://www.amazon.com/dp/1645162818 (Buy) the Lean Game Plan Follow me on https://twitter.com/dailyleancoach (Twitter@dailyleancoach)Join me on https://my.captivate.fm/www.linkedin.com/in/tomreedamericanlean (Linked In)

Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Evolving HR Using Behavioral Science with Ryan McShane

Behavioral Grooves Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 6, 2020 85:50


Ryan McShane is the President and CEO of HR Evolution, a consultancy that designs systems that support employee alignment to organizational purpose through HR best practices, organizational development initiatives, and professional development solutions. We discussed a variety of HR related topics including psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and what can be done when it comes to improving the mindset of leaders. Ryan stressed that WIIFM (what’s in it for me) is central to the impetus to change at all levels of the organization. Plus, he offered a particularly cool insight: Change comes about when the pain of staying the same is higher than doing something different. We also discussed how the social contract between the employer and the employee has changed dramatically. And we got to hear Ryan’s rationale for being so optimistic about a future where employers need to put forth extra effort to attract and retain the best and brightest workers. It got us thinking: could the growing gig economy actually offer more value to the employees than the employers? Lastly, we appreciated Ryan’s approach to working through the pandemic and the reminder that intimidation and scare tactics have no place in today’s workplace. Frederick Taylor’s vision of work should be a thing of the past. Period. We hope you enjoy our conversation with this very bright behavioral science practitioner, and as always, let us know what you think! © 2020 Behavioral Grooves   Links Ryan McShane: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-mcshane-743382a/ Ryan’s email: rmcshane@hrevolutionllc.com HR Evolution: https://hrevolutionllc.com/ Zappos: https://www.zappos.com/ US Census Bureau Pulse Surveys: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/household-pulse-survey/data.html Schumann Resonance:

The W. Edwards Deming Institute® Podcast
Deming Lens #43 - Management Theories Part 2

The W. Edwards Deming Institute® Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 27, 2020 16:27


In our 43rd "Deming Lens" episode, host Tripp Babbitt shares his interpretation of wide-ranging aspects and implications of Dr. Deming's theory of management. This month he looks at Management Theories contrasting Frederick Taylor and the work of W. Edwards Deming. Show Notes [00:00:14] Deming Lens - Episode 43 [00:03:30] Taylorism Flaw #1 [00:03:57] Neo-Taylorism [00:05:24] Taylorism Flaw #2 [00:06:23] Taylorism Flaw #3 [00:07:28] Taylorism Flaw #4 [00:09:22] Taylorism Flaw #5 [00:10:18] Taylorism Flaw #6 [00:11:37] Taylorism Flaw #7 [00:12:46] Taylorism Flaw #8     Transcript Tripp Babbitt: [00:00:14] In this edition of The Deming Lens will complete a series on mangement theories contrasting Frederick Taylor and the work of W. Edwards Deming.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:00:31] Hi, I'm Tripp Babbitt, hosts of the Deming Insitute podcast, and in the last Deming Lent, the 40 second episode, I talked about Frederick Taylor and scientific management and things of that sort and in essence, brought in the book Deming's Profound Changes, coauthored by one of the members of the Deming Institute Advisory Council. And it's an important book. I've mentioned it before in previous episodes. I've talked about this, but I think it's from the perspective of how a manager thinks. I think it's helpful to understand kind of what's being taught in universities and colleges versus what Dr. Deming was talking about. And I I my personal admiration for this book has to do with being able to differentiate between what Frederick Taylor did in the early nineteen hundreds and what Dr. Deming proposed in his system of profound knowledge that he wrote in 1992. And we're talking about, to me, a huge difference. In matter of fact, the the difference I use are a way to describe it is the Fosbury flop.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:02:10] You know, Fosbury the Fosbury flop is the way everybody does the high jump today. But when it first came out in 1968 at the Olympics, it was something very new.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:02:22] So I want to walk through these things as this episode be a little bit longer. But I want to walk through these eight things that I ended the last episode with. And they are were the flaws of Taylorism. And I'm going to take you through kind of three levels for each of these things.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:02:42] One is how Taylor the floor of Taylor's thinking what the book Deming's for Profound Changes talks about in terms of what's referenced as Neo Taylorism, which is kind of taking what Taylor did in the nineteen hundreds or early nineteen hundreds and the way management has kind of played it out in today's world. And I think these things, even though that means profound changes, a little bit dated now too, it's still relevant and kind of where we've been and kind of how Dr. Deming saw things. So let's just start and I'll walk through these and you'll see some recurring themes in here, as I did years ago.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:03:30] And I've focused in on some of the overlaps of the thinking as far as the flaws go. So let's just jump into them. So the first one was belief in management control as the essential precondition for increased productivity. That was the flaw associated with Frederick Taylor and his thinking and the way this is played out.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:03:57] You think in terms of Neo Taylor ism or the way it's played out today is that your boss is your customer. I mean, they are the ones that, in essence, tell you what to do on a daily basis. They're the ones who judge the judge and jury of your work. And this is pretty widespread, I would say, in most organizations.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:04:22] Now, the way Deming viewed things was that management job is not to control and that management's job was to coach and to provide methods and tools. And for me, the emphasis on methods really struck home because Method's gives you a way to achieve what you're trying to accomplish. And not many there's not a lot of focus in management today on methods. It's more what type of leader are you? Do you have emotional intelligence and things of that sort? And what I think is really missing is then I think those are soft skills. And I'm not saying they're not important.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:05:05] They're very important. But there's also the hard skills or what I reference is hard skills, which are methods to do things like innovate and, you know, the ways to look at data and ways to develop your synthetic thinking. But we'll talk about some of those a little bit later.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:05:24] The second thing was belief in the possibility of optimal processes and. The needlestick way, and I think you could even go back to Frederick Taylor himself, and so there was always one best way to do something and everybody's always looking for best practices or, oh, the competitor did this. And we've got to copy that because there have been so successful. Sometimes they're been successful with it. But the impression is that what they're doing is cool.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:05:52] And so we've got to copy what somebody else is doing. And Deming was his advocacy was for there was always a better way and that that mindset always exists. There's always a way to do something better. And for instance, technology can help us see new things, but it doesn't necessarily have to do them or accomplish them. So that's one of the big differences then between Deming and Taylor,   Tripp Babbitt: [00:06:23] The third thing, a narrow view of process improvement. Now we get into this subject of synthetic thinking a little bit. And Neil Taylorism is management reorganizations were use our use today as a substitute for actual improvement or in the book they reference process improvement. I think it's just improvement in general. But this is in essence, what the book said from a Neotel Ristic standpoint. Dr. Deming was about process improvement. And I like to distinguish greatly at this point something I've learned over the years, which is process improvement.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:07:07] The way that it's looked at today is far less effective than systemic improvement. And this means that you have to become a synthetic thinker and understand that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that many organizations are, you know, the same process improvement and Deming.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:07:28] But what we really want to do in order to become effective is achieve systemic improvement to make the hole better. So this is a good Segway into the fourth thing, which is low level sub optimization instead of total system improvement.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:07:50] So there's this recurring theme now of systemic improvement, or I like to reference synthetic thinking that you need in order to improve an entire system.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:08:04] And the Neo-Tayloristic view is and we see this in organizations all the time, probably have it in your organization, are quotas or targets for individuals and teams and departments and things of that sort. So this is, again, breaking the parts down and trying to optimize each of the pieces within an organization that you cannot contrast that against Dr. Deming's thinking and the story or the way to convey this. I think best that people can kind of get is when he used an orchestra and that an orchestra.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:08:42] Doesn't have a group of 150 primadonnas trying to play their own solos. They all have their moment or maybe they never have their moment, but they all know what their role is within trying to create music that's pleasing to the ear. And and along with that, because you are able to get hundred and fifty people to cooperate in order to achieve the aim of creating beautiful music, you know, everybody wins.There's a satisfaction associated with the whole system operating well.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:09:22] The fifth thing is the cause of defects in a Tayloristic mindset is people, you know, oh, we've got to find somebody to blame and you know, somebody and this is very, very prevalent within organizations. And so because of that and the Neil Taylor mistake or the more modern application of Taylor's thinking, we see all of these worker motivation schemes. And this this can be distinguished from Deming and synthetic thinking or systems thinking that defects are from the system and not people. And Dr. Deming's favors a famous percentage was 94 percent of the defects are from the system and only six percent is from the individual or special special causes or events.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:10:18] The sixth thing, separation of planning and doing neo Taylorism again, separation of management from the workplace in the front line is still even today. Unless you're a small organization, will see management will be on some floor, maybe upper floor of an organization and they don't really come into contact with the people, you know, where the work is being done or with front line people.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:10:46] And Dr. Deming's view was that there was a need for management to understand the processes that they manage, that you needed to understand the work that you were managing as opposed to just collecting data on what's going on. And that we need to value the contribution and value created by the worker and that's that is a huge shift for a lot of organizations, is just that we're talking in terms of culture change. This is one of the things that I see organizations struggle with a lot, because that isn't the reason I became an executive or a manager, was to, you know, be around, you know, the front line workers doing stuff. I can manage them with the data and, you know, process charts and things of that sort.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:11:37] The seventh thing, failure to recognize systems and communities in the organization that Neotel Ristic or modern view of this has worked is viewed individually instead of collaboratively.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:11:54] And this whole collaboration piece when we talked in terms of the orchestra comes to mind when you think of the systems which you're involved with. And there's a couple of things I pull from this. One is abdication of management's responsibility for the welfare of employees. We see this played out from an artistic standpoint.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:12:17] We get layoffs, we get rank and yank, although we're seeing less of that nowadays and at its height during the 90s and even the early 2000s. And, you know, we got to contrast this with Dr. Deming's view of, you know, what is best for society, what is the greater good, what is really the aim here where everybody has an opportunity to win?   Tripp Babbitt: [00:12:46] The eighth thing is view of workers as interchangeable by bionic machines. The need tailor a Ristic view is failure to recognize the major effect of the system on an employee's performance. And this is one of the things I think when I'm discussing with management or executives about their organization and their performance is that they because they're not synthetic thinking is something you have to develop within your organization. I don't think you just say you need to understand the whole and people get that they need excuse me. They need to do it. Why? They're looking at their own organization. And so Deming is a promote promotes basically that the system, as I mentioned before, the 94 percent is what you need to focus in on.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:13:44] And and by focusing in on the six percent or even just the individual, you're going to lose out what gains that you get of systemic thinking. And we hit this again, we're talking in terms of process improvement problem. And I and I wish Dr. Deming would have used the word systemic improvement process improvement. Again, we're talking about analytic thinking, of kind of trying to optimize the pieces, the individual, the team, and not understanding how the whole might gain and that sometimes different departments may need to give a little as opposed to get.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:14:30] And sometimes the way this plays out from a Neo-Tayloristic standpoint is we have profit centers and maybe not. You might go so far I'd never heard it talked in terms of, you know, the individual must show profit. But certainly in terms of individual departments, I've heard of, you know, H.R. departments and finance departments have to show that they're profitable. I don't understand the thinking there because they're they're they're enablers. They are not the ones that create value for the customer.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:15:06] But those are the eight things. Deming's view was very different.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:15:11] And that's why I say that Dr. Deming and his system of profound knowledge is a huge leap from where Frederick Taylor taken us and how we've made it.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:15:26] Tried to make it better by what we're teaching in universities and, you know, Dr. Deming's message still isn't broadly taught at universities and certainly far less understood by universities and what what he did. And so this offers huge opportunity, I think, for an organization, you know, trying trying to compete in a global marketplace. This that is this week's Deming Lens. And we will talk to you next month.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:16:01] Hi, this is Tripp Babbitt. One way that you can help the Deming Institute. And this podcast is by providing a rating on Apple podcasts. If you have additional comments, you can reach me at tripp@deming.org.  

The W. Edwards Deming Institute® Podcast
Deming Lens #42 - Management Theories Part 1

The W. Edwards Deming Institute® Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 30, 2020 7:55


In our 42nd "Deming Lens" episode, host Tripp Babbitt shares his interpretation of wide-ranging aspects and implications of Dr. Deming's theory of management. This month he looks at Management Theories. Show Notes [00:00:14] Deming Lens #42 [00:02:16] Deming's Profound Changes [00:03:25] Weber, Taylor and Fayol [00:07:11] Mary Parker Follett     Transcript Tripp Babbitt: [00:00:14] In Episode 42 of The Deming Lens, we'll begin to discuss management theory, starting with some history.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:00:29] Hi, I'm Tripp Babbitt, host of the Deming Institue podcast. Tripp Babbitt: [00:00:46]  This month I wanted to do a two-part series or start a two part series on management theory. And the first part will go through and we'll cover people that were influential in management theory and what their thinking was from the really the beginning of the industrial revolution to until today.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:01:54] A lot of that influence still exists and maybe some of the problems associated with some of those theories. And the next month, what I'll do is I'm going to walk through how the Deming philosophy, the system of profound knowledge differs from some of the classic management theory.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:02:16] And I'm a big fan for those of you who are watching the video of Deming's profound changes and Dan Robertson and Ken Delevingne or two folks that wrote it, influenced by the work of Perry Gluckman, who they liked as a mentor and coached them on the Deming philosophy. But Perry Gluckman actually was a student of Dr. Deming back at NYU. But he walks through a lot of the differences and some of the things a lot of the information that I have will be drawn from Deming's profound changes.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:02:56] Now, let's set the scene a little bit. So the industrial revolution starting late. Seventeen hundreds to the late eighteen hundreds, energy changed. We have steam and hydropower.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:03:09] We've got machinery coming out. We have new ways of transporting people. And now the question becomes, how do we organize all of this and and how do we increase productivity and manage the people?   Tripp Babbitt: [00:03:25] And so there were three, in essence, influencers during that time for what some folks will call classic management theory. And one wasn't Max Weber or Veber Frederick Taylor and Henry Fayol. And those three primarily made up a lot of what we know today with Frederick Taylor. To me, being probably the most influential of those particular three opinion, Max Weber basically was very big picture. He talked a lot about bureaucracy and that these organizations should be an extension of government, a lot of legal, rational types of thinking, and also came up with the original philosophy of hiring the best people. Henry Faile talked a lot about management and administration science, and it really focused on a few things, five things planning, organization, command, coordinate and control. And those were his five things associated with management and emphasized that management should stay out of the details of the work. And then Frederick Taylor, obviously scientific management, which is the basis of a lot of the book, Deming's profound changes and the differences, but he kind of kind of grabbed some of the ideas of Max Weber and Henry fail and put them into his system, but of scientific management. And it's really applying science to the work. And he did things like time and motion studies. And we'll get into a little bit more of the detail associated with that next month as we kind of contrast the thinking of these thinkers.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:05:29] Now, what were some of the problems associated with this thinking that came from these areas? Well, I am I guess not going to say the problems at this point, the commonalities of these three philosophies. There was the hierarchy. They all believed in hierarchy. They believed in the division of labor. They believed and the centralization of authority, the separation of work and personal life, that those two things should be different, that you have always hire the best employees and pay you wanted to pay people with their your best people. And that there was one right way to do things. So those are kind of the commonalities, some of the flaws associated with some of this management thinking, this management theory is, and this is out of Deming's profound changes, is one belief in management controls the essential precondition of increasing productivity to belief in the possibility of optimal processes. Three, a narrow view of process improvement for low level. So optimization instead of holistic total system improvement. Five Separation of planning and doing. Recognition of only one cause of death affects people seven. Failure to recognize systems and communities in the organization. And a view of workers as interchangeable bionic machines. Now, I want to make a kind of a side note here.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:07:11] And Mary Parker Follette, who worked with Frederick Taylor, actually was the first person to kind of come out and say that there's something out there with regards to systems. And so this will kind of set us up for next month, will walk through some of these management theories. And I've got to tell you that these management theories are still well entrenched in management today and almost subconsciously, but they're taught in a university still today. And I think that that's part of the problem and that we haven't advanced beyond that. To other thinkers like Dr. Deming, like Russell Akef, like Ludwig von Berlanti, those people have kind of advanced the management. But it seems like we're still teaching and doing the things of some of these thinkers from the Industrial Revolution time period. So anyway, that's what we'll do next month. If you have comments. You can reach me at tripp@Deming.org. That's it for this month. We'll talk to you next month in the second part of this series.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:08:51] Hi, this is Tripp Babbitt. One way that you can help the Deming Institute in this podcast is by providing a reading on Apple podcasts. If you have additional comments, you can reach me at Tripp@deming.org.

Zwiebelschälen bis zum Kern
#17 – Marks Versöhnung mit Frederick Taylor

Zwiebelschälen bis zum Kern

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2020 29:09


Es war einer der Hauptantriebe von Mark und Lars bei der Gründung von intrinsify: Die Befreiung der Unternehmen und Menschen vom vermeintlich bösen Taylorismus. Heute sagt Mark: "Mit Taylor würde ich zusammenarbeiten". Wie es zu diesem Sinneswandel kam und welche Bedeutung Taylor heute noch hat, das haben Fabian und Mark in dieser Episode besprochen.

Troubleshooting Agile
In Praise of Taylor

Troubleshooting Agile

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 7, 2020 13:07


Frederick Taylor gets a bad rap - even from us, as we had a lot to say in Agile Conversations about how his methods have been misapplied in "software factories". But in the right circumstances, his ideas about repeatable, simple processes have a lot of value, and can lead directly to valuable automation opportunities. We describe examples including how continuous integration developed from an arcane art to a routine process along Taylorist lines. SHOW LINKS: - Taylorism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management - Cynefin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework - Team of Teams: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22529127-team-of-teams - IdealCast: https://itrevolution.com/the-idealcast-episode-11/ --- Our new book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://conversationaltransformation.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list! We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show. 
 Email us at info@conversationaltransformation.com

The Art of Management
6 and 8, The Dark Side of Estimates

The Art of Management

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2020 25:53


Peter Drucker is famous for pointing out how much better managers could manage if they only used numbers. His message: “…if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.”  Managing is the business of numbers…or is it? Certainly, Frederick Taylor, the inventor of Scientific Management felt that way.  What neither of them [...]

Pensamientos de liderazgo y empresarismo.
Gerencia, Equipos y algo más:

Pensamientos de liderazgo y empresarismo.

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 15, 2020 20:58


Frederick Taylor: gerencia científica (1880, 1890) y como repercute hoy día. · Trabaja para mejorar la eficiencia en una fabrica: (historia de su fabrica de metales). o Para esos tiempos los trabajos eran artesanales y el los convirtió en procesos espicificos que cualquier persona podría lograr. El era un optimizador de sistemas. · La gerencia es la que piensa y los empleados ejecutan una función estrictamente prestablecida. · No se toma en consideración las opiniones de los obreros. · Las organizaciones de hoy día cumplen con parámetros establecidos por Taylor (Organigrama). · Esto funciona en estructuras y bases económicas lineares (fáciles de predecir) Hoy día el ambiente es muy diferente y complejo ya no basta con tener formulas prestablecidas para lograr los objetivos. · Hoy día los objetivos y las variables son cambiantes. · Los ambientes laborables son dinámicos. o la estructura organizacional no solo se comunica de arriba hacia abajo sino que corre en todas las direcciones. o A los empleados se les provee ciertas libertades en las tomas de decisiones. · Hoy el líder ejemplar no es el que manda sino el que enseña y muestra con su ejemplo como se deben hacer la cosas y da paso al dialogo en la toma de decisiones. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/arturo-castrodad/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/arturo-castrodad/support

Progress In Work
5. Are You a Conductor or Mechanic?

Progress In Work

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 14, 2020 14:17


Today’s episode explores the best metaphor for describing management, Frederick Taylor, the father of the scientific theory of management, why extrinsic motivation is an undependable way to motivate your employees and why Patrick thinks of orchestra conductors as the best metaphor for leadership. Topics referenced in today’s episode: Frederick Taylor Do You Have the Will to Lead?

Love Your Work
235. Clock Time Event Time

Love Your Work

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 9, 2020 12:44


Before I moved to Colombia, I lived several “mini lives” in Medellín. I came and lived here for a few months. I escaped the very worst portion of the Chicago winters. There was a phenomenon I experienced every time I came here, which taught me a lot about how I think about time. It always happened right around the three week mark. Getting used to a slower pace of life The pace of life in Medellín is different from the pace of life in Chicago. It’s slower. People talk slower, people walk slower. That thing where you stand on the right side of the escalator so people can pass on the left -- yeah, people don’t really do that here. They stand wherever they like. It’s usually not a problem. It’s rare that anyone climbs up the escalator while it’s moving, anyway. Whenever I came on a trip to Medellín, the same thing happened: The first week, the slower pace of life was refreshing. The second week, as I was trying to get into a routine, it started to get annoying. The third week, some incident would occur, and I would -- I’m not proud to say -- lose my shit. A comedy of errors The last time I went through this transition, it was a concert malfunction. I showed up to the theater to see a concert, and the gates were locked. A chulito wrapper rolled by in the wind, like a tumbleweed. Nobody was around, except a stray cat. Is it the wrong day? I confirmed on the website: The concert is today, at this time, at this place. So where is everybody? As I walked around the building, looking for another entrance, I saw a security guard. He told me the concert was cancelled. Something broken on the ceiling of the theater. This was especially aggravating because of everything I had gone through to get these tickets. My foreign credit card didn’t work on the ticket website, so I had to go to a physical ticket kiosk. But then the girl working the kiosk said the system was down. So I came back the next day, and the system was also down. No, it wasn’t “still” down -- it was just down “again.” So I waited in a nearby chair in the mall for forty-five minutes. Then I finally got my tickets. And now the concert is cancelled. I go to the ticket booth at the theater to get my money back. But they tell me I can’t do that here -- I have to go to a special kiosk, across town. Oh, and I can’t do it today -- they won’t be ready to process my refund until tomorrow. I take the afternoon off to go get my refund. After standing in line for half an hour, they tell me they can’t process my refund on my foreign credit card. I have to fill out a form, which they’ll mail to the home office in Bogotá. I should get my refund within ten days. I’m always wary that I’m an immigrant living in another country -- that sometimes the way they do things in that country makes no sense to me. I never want to come off as the “impatient gringo.” But at this point, I become the impatient gringo. I demand my money back, and recount the whole experience to the clerk. In my perturbed state, my Spanish is even more embarrassingly broken. I give in, fill out the form, and leave the ticket kiosk -- without my money. And I’ve been through this enough times to know what’s coming. Out on the sidewalk, in an instant, as if a switch were flipped in my brain, I go from steaming with anger, to calm as a clam. Months worth of pent-up tension melts away from the muscles in my neck and back. I feel relaxed -- almost high. Flipping the “temporal switch” I call this moment the “temporal switch.” I’ve talked to other expats about this phenomenon, and they report something similar. That when you first come to Medellín, it takes awhile to get into the rhythm of life here. But once you’re in that rhythm, you’re more relaxed, more laid back. You’re even happier. You might wonder what my concert catastrophe has to do with the rhythm of life in Colombia. I might be wrong, but somehow it seems that malfunctions are incredibly common here. It certainly seems so to myself and other expats that live here, and even Colombians agree. (If the concert incident is any support for this theory, I’ll add that I never did get a refund -- I ended up calling AMEX to do a chargeback.) These malfunctions have a symbiotic relationship with the rhythm of life. The internal chatter I experience whenever I make the temporal switch might provide some insight. I’m telling myself, “Things aren’t going to work out the first time you try them. You might as well relax, go with the flow, and enjoy the moment.” So perhaps everyone is telling themselves that. “Things aren’t going to work out the first time you try them.” That could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. In any case, even if things don’t work out on the first try, don’t worry. It will work out eventually. As the Colombians say, ¡No pasa nada! Some people are on “clock-time.” Other people are on “event-time.” The main reason I chose Colombia as a place to double down on writing was that I simply do better writing while I’m here. I think this temporal switch has a lot to do with that. In his global studies in attitudes about time, social psychologist Robert Levine identified two distinct approaches to time: There’s clock-time, and there’s event-time. Clock-time people schedule according to the time on the clock. Lunch is at this time, this meeting will end at this time, and the next meeting will begin at this other time. Event-time people schedule according to events. When I’m hungry, I’ll eat lunch. This meeting will end once we’ve met the objective, and if that doesn’t take all afternoon, we’ll have this other meeting after that one. Event-time and the “eight-day” week I went through the temporal switch several times before I knew about these two time orientations. Now that I know about clock-time and event-time, much of the behavior that I found puzzling now makes sense. There’s no better illustration of event-time than how Colombians view a week. If a Colombian wants to meet with you a week from now, they will say, “en ocho dias” -- in eight days. The first time I heard this, I was incredibly confused. Today is Wednesday, so -- ocho dias: next Thursday? I was surprised to learn that the eight-day “week” is the standard here in Colombia, as well as many other event-time countries. If today is Wednesday, eight days from now is also Wednesday. As a clock-time person, I was initially convinced that this was objectively wrong. Counting on the clock, the meeting will take place more or less exactly seven days from now -- seven rotations of the earth. But if you think about it from an event-time perspective, it’s not wrong at all. Today is an event, which has not yet ended. There will be six additional days -- each day its own event -- between now and the meeting. The day the meeting takes place is an event in itself. Add that up -- one, six, one, -- and you’ve got eight days between now and the meeting which takes place a week from now. This is not the Beatles’ Eight Days a Week. That was a malapropism -- said by a chauffeur to illustrate that he was working hard. Instead, this is literally how event-time people see the week. It’s a refreshing thought, really: Today counts. Both clock-time and event-time have their place It can come off as politically incorrect to even point out these different attitudes about time. If any of these observations sound judgemental to you, stop and think: Is it because one approach sounds better to you than the other? Well there’s your problem! Both event-time and clock-time are useful, for different contexts. Researchers Tamar Avnet and Anne-Laure Sellier found that both clock-time and event-time approaches can lead to good outcomes. It depends what you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re trying to be efficient, clock-time is the way to go. If you’re stacking bricks, Frederick Taylor’s approach to timing movements will get the wall up faster. It’s a clock-time approach. But if you’re trying to be effective, event-time is the way to go. If you’re trying to think of the perfect gift for your tenth wedding anniversary, getting it right is more important than doing it quickly. Avnet and Sellier’s study also demonstrated that clock-time and event-time approaches aren’t strictly cultural. Most of us change our approach based upon what we’re trying to accomplish. It’s when we use a clock-time approach, when an event-time approach would be better, that we get ourselves into trouble. Clock-time is a creativity killer Think about the things you’ve learned in previous episodes of Love Your Work. Remember from episode 218 that creative work follows four distinct stages. Remember from episode 226 that when Frederick Taylor tried to treat time as a production unit] his productivity eventually collapsed. Consider this study from Stanford. They found that the busier knowledge workers were, the less creative they were. The more they struggled to fit work into the time available, the more they let creativity fall by the wayside. Remember some of the ways that creative work is not like moving chunks of iron or stacking bricks. Ideas can be worthless, or they can be priceless. Ideas can also arrive in an instant. And when they do arrive, the moment they arrive is often far removed from the work that produced the idea. When the work you’re doing right now isn’t immediately bringing results, and when those results may come unpredictably -- at any time -- you can see how working on clock-time is a stressful recipe. Use time as a guide, not as restriction So what’s the solution? Should you be a clock-time person, or should you be an event-time person? Obviously, if you can’t do anything on-time, you’re going to have a tough time. You’ll disrespect people by showing up late, you’ll miss deadlines. You’ll end up racing against the clock. But I prefer to think of time as descriptive, not prescriptive. The minutes and hours on the clock are not little boxes that you need to stuff work into. The minutes and hours on the clock are instead rough measurements for how to allocate your energy. Time is a useful proxy for measuring and dividing up energy. It’s not a strict template for guiding every action you take. If you read roughly an hour a day, you’ll read a lot of books. If you meditate roughly fifteen minutes a day, you’ll be more present the rest of your day. If you brainstorm something for five minutes today, the solution will come to you sometime tomorrow. If instead, you’re trying to finish reading a chapter in the next ten minutes, or you’re trying to come up with the perfect company strategy before the meeting ends at noon, your efforts are just going to backfire. Avnet and Sellier have found that people who depend too much on the clock to dictate their schedules are less present, are less able to savor positive emotions, and are less open to the unpredictable and emerging opportunities that are inherent to creative work. Pay attention to how you’re scheduling your work. Ask yourself: Am I working according to the clock -- trying to fit work into restricted time; or am I working according to events -- trying to get it right? If you’re trying to be creative, try to practice less clock-time, and more event-time. Image: Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, Giacomo Balla My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/clock-time-event-time/

The W. Edwards Deming Institute® Podcast
Deming Lens #37 - Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation

The W. Edwards Deming Institute® Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 29, 2020 10:22


In our 37th "Deming Lens" episode, host Tripp Babbitt shares his interpretation of wide-ranging aspects and implications of Dr. Deming's theory of management. This month he revisits intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. Show Notes [00:00:15] Deming Lens - Episode 37 [00:00:27] Episode 37 - Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation [00:02:09] Dr. Adam Grant Research on Fundraising [00:07:10] Revisiting the Lasting Impact of Taylorism     Transcript Tripp Babbitt: [00:00:15] In the thirty seventh edition of The Demming Lens, I'll discuss intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:00:27] Hi, I'm Tripp Babbitt. Host of the Deming Institute podcast. And in this Deming lens, I was. Doing some research for my Mind Your Noodles podcast. And I really think this is applies to the Deming community, so I wanted to share some things that I found was doing some research. I think it really applies. Back in the 1980s, Deming users groups were familiar with Alfie Cohn and his two important works published Punished by Rewards and No Contest. The Case Against Competition. And Dr. Deming would often cite Alfie's work during his seminars and videos and things of that sort. But in Punch by Rewards, Alfie Cohn talked quite a bit as Dr. Deming about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the intrinsic motivation was found to be by far the better motivator. And I think fundamentally, all of us kind of understand that, especially being in the Demming community, where if you're new, I think you will find if you read the two books by Alfie Cohn and Dr Deming's works that or videos that you'll find the same thing. But I did come across some relatively new studies that help shed light on this intrinsic over extrinsic motivation. And they are by a pretty well-known author, which is Dr.   [00:02:09] Adam Grant. He's written many books, originals and a number of different books that are relevant with with interesting research and studies. And in his studies, he he's found that when a worker is connected somehow to the customer, that they can see the impact on a customer, that it provides them with some intrinsic motivation. But the study that really got my attention was this one that was with a fund raising company that he worked with and they were having turnover of raisers. If you could imagine, that would be a pretty tough job of about 400 percent every year. So basically, every quarter would have turnover of a completely new staff of people and. You know, basically, the job was that they were to call alumni of a university to solicit funds, donations for scholarships, and so with this turnover amount, he went to different. Really thousands of executives and ask him what they would do. And not surprisingly, most of them thought that the answer would be no. Offering some type of incentive, you know, increased pay rewards, things of that sort. All extrinsic types of motivators.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:03:51] But from previous research, Grant theorized having a student share with the fundraiser raisers how the scholarship would make a different error, had made a difference in their lives, would help improve motivation. And it did. And again, if you had a lot of Alphie cone stuff, you're probably not too surprised. Or you may be surprised if you're new to the to the Demming community. But what they what he found was there was an increase of about a hundred, 42 percent in weekly time spent on the phone doing the fund fundraiser. And there was an increase of 400 percent. And the amount that was raised weekly went from 400 dollars to greater than to that two thousand dollars every week. So this idea of intrinsic motivation being more important than extrinsic motivation still isn't in the minds of executives, of people that are actually pulling the strings. And, you know, if we take ourselves back to the Taylor Ristic ideas from Frederick Taylor in the early nineteen hundreds. This idea of, boy, if we, you know, went to Schmitt and the worker carrying pig iron I believe was, was, was the, was the job and he wanted to produce more of this than he would just offer incentives, extrinsic types of incentives in order to get more. And this think he gets perpetuated despite every bit of evidence that shows that intrinsic motivation is is far greater. And IMPAC in fact, one study that I found said that nine in 10 workers would be willing to to be paid less if they did meaningful work. You know, from their perspective and we see we still aren't tapping into this into with organizations, despite Dr. Deming's pleas, Offie KONE's, please, all of the research that's being done. And it's this being rooted back in this Taylor Ristic type of thinking that perpetuates what's going on here.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:06:30] Well, I can say the U.S., because we seem to be the ones really stuck in this.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:06:34] But this is this is global, too, that the extrinsic rewards are the greater motivator or the prime motivator over intrinsic rewards. And obviously, from Dr. Grant study, we found that he found that. That that this is still the thinking of executives, if we're going to decrease turnover, what's offer more rewards? And it was something so simple as having a student come and share what they're doing now.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:07:10] My experience in working with organizations has been that because of the functional separation of work and this really started at least and from what I've read from Frederick Taylor, you know, separating out the pieces that the work, nobody can see the impact. It's not like the blacksmith anymore that would take the order was the CEO, in essence, would take the order, do the work and then get feedback from the customer. We don't have that type of arrangement in many organizations anymore, and therefore we're disconnected from the customer. So if you can imagine when you call into a contact center, how many things are resolved at the contact center level? Some are. But some of the deeper problems or the delivery of the service or the product, we never really know. You you would never really know in a contact center whether the service was good or bad. And it's one of the things that drives me absolutely bonkers is, you know, getting the message at the beginning of a call into a customer service area. And they say, well, hold on. And we're going to take a survey of basically how the contact center agent dead. And you know how I mean, where was the person? Nice. I mean, what what what am I rating? I'm not really rating, nor can they see how things perform. So I rarely do the surveys that are on there unless I'm angry about something. To be honest with you. Or they were able to resolve the problem and to my satisfaction.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:08:59] But that doesn't happen. Like I said, it doesn't happen very often in a in a contact center because of the separation of work, nor do they see.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:09:07] So from if you could imagine sitting in contacts in here all day and nine out of 10 of your calls are things that you can't resolve and you never know the outcome. How satisfying can it be, how meaningful work cannot be. And so there's opportunities here to develop meaningful work. But I wanted to share this these studies because real I thought this what were are these studies were important things to think about as we talk in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.   Tripp Babbitt: [00:09:45] Thank you for listening to the Deming Institute podcast. Stay updated on the latest blogs, podcasts, programs and other activities at Demming dot org.  

Love Your Work
226. The End of Time Management

Love Your Work

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 16, 2020 16:40


As the nineteenth century was turning to the twentieth century, Frederick Taylor grabbed a stopwatch. He stood next to a worker, and instructed that worker on exactly how to pick up a chunk of iron. Over and over, Taylor tweaked the prescribed movements. Grip the chunk of iron in this way, turn in this way, bend in this way. Once Taylor found the optimal combination of movements, he taught the process to other workers. Their productivity skyrocketed. “Taylorism,” as it came to be called, brought us leaps and bounds forward in productivity. Today, the remnants of Taylorism are ruining productivity. After Taylor’s intervention, the workers who were moving only twelve tons of iron a day were now moving forty-eight tons of iron a day. They quadrupled their productivity. Only a few decades before Taylorism, most people’s concept of time was more closely linked to the movement of the sun than it was to the stopwatch hand. The availability of daylight, the height of a stalk of corn, or the day of first frost that signaled the coming of winter, ruled the work of farmhands. Many of Taylor’s workers objected to having their movement so closely watched and timed, down to the second. Actually, more accurately than that -- Taylor’s stopwatch timed according to the hundredth-of-a-minute. But, “scientific management”, as it was called, swept through the industrial world. Companies couldn’t stay in business without adopting it. The goal of Taylorism was to produce the most work possible in the minimum amount of time. As Taylor watched the movements of the workers, he was trying to reduce waste. He wanted each motion to be as quick and efficient as possible. He wanted each hundredth of a minute to bring the job closer to being done. But, Taylor discovered there was a limit. Logically, there’s no point in a worker sitting idle. Logically, if the worker keeps moving iron, he’ll move more iron than the worker who stops for a smoke break. Intuitively, if you want to get the highest output possible out of the minimum amount of time, take your efficient movements, and fill all of the time with those movements. But, Taylor discovered, it didn’t work that way. The point of diminishing returns There’s a concept in economics called the point of diminishing returns. We can see the point of diminishing returns in action if we imagine Frederick Taylor filling the yard of Bethlehem Steel with workers. Imagine Frederick Taylor has one worker moving iron in the yard of Bethlehem Steel. Thanks to following Taylor’s prescribed movements, that worker is moving forty-eight tons of iron a day. Then, Taylor adds another worker. Now, the workers are moving ninety-six tons of iron a day. Taylor can keep adding workers, and the productivity in the yard will keep going up by forty-eight tons for each worker Taylor adds. Until... Until they start to run out of space. There’s just not as much room in the yard for the workers to pick up the iron, and move it from one place to another. They get in each other’s way, they run into each other, or one worker will have to wait for another worker to finish his job before that first worker can finish his job. At first, it’s not a huge problem. Taylor has merely reached the point of diminishing returns. The point of diminishing returns is the point at which each additional production unit -- in this case, the production unit is workers -- each worker doesn’t return as much benefit as the previous production units did. The return is diminishing. At some point, Taylor adds a worker, and doesn’t get an additional forty-eight tons of production. He gets only forty. Like I say, it’s not a huge deal. They’re still moving more iron than they were before they added that worker. Their margins are high enough on the labor costs that they’re still making more profit. Now, let’s apply this concept to a single worker. Only now the production unit isn’t the workers themselves. The production unit is time. As Taylor filled the available time with motion, the output of a worker rose. But at some point, Taylor hit the point of diminishing returns. As he filled the available time with efficient, optimized motion, at some point, the additional time filled didn’t bring the returns that the previous units of time did. Maybe he tried instructing the worker to move three chunks of iron in ten minutes, then had no problem adding a fourth chunk of iron within that ten minutes. He could string together these ten-minute units, one after another. He could fill up a day with those units, and get the output he expected. But then, at some point, moving an additional chunk of iron in that same unit of time didn’t bring Taylor the returns he expected. In this case, let’s say that number was five chunks of iron within ten minutes. Maybe the worker could keep it up for an hour, but soon the worker would get tired. Eventually, the worker couldn’t move that fifth chunk of iron within a ten-minute unit. The worker got too fatigued. Taylor had reached the point of diminishing returns. The point of negative returns Let’s go back to the steelyard, where Taylor is adding workers. At some point after the point of diminishing returns, Taylor isn’t getting forty-eight tons of output per additional worker, nor is he getting forty tons of output per additional worker. At one point, workers were waiting for one another or getting in each other’s way once in awhile. But now the yard of Bethlehem Steel is nearly gridlocked. The workers are constantly in each other’s way. They’re getting fatigued holding the chunks of iron. Injuries are skyrocketing. Productivity in the steel yard collapses. Taylor is way beyond the point of diminishing returns. Not only is he not getting the output he expected from adding an additional worker. That would be the point of diminishing returns. Taylor has now hit the point of negative returns. He’s now getting less output overall per additional worker. For each worker Taylor adds, he’ll get less output than he would have if that worker had just stayed home. Creative work is not industrial work Scientific management is simple enough when you’re moving chunks of iron. Simply experiment with the amount of iron moved in a given amount of time. Eventually, you’ll find the right formula. But creative work is different in a number of ways. There are three ways: One: Some ideas are more valuable than others. Two: It doesn’t take time to have an idea. Three: In creativity, actions don’t link to results. Some ideas are more valuable than others First, some ideas are more valuable than others. Imagine you write two 50,000-word novels, in parallel. Let’s say you work equally as hard on the first novel as you do on the second novel. You spend just as much time typing the first novel as the second. The first novel sells zero copies. The second one sells a million copies. They’re both free of misspellings. They’re both quality writing. Why does one sell a million copies, while the other sells zero? If the performance of the traditional publishing industry tells us anything, it’s that nobody has any idea why one novel falls flat and the other takes off. But, you can know this: Not all ideas have equal market value. In fact, the difference in market value, for the same amount of work, can be infinite. So, words typed, while a worthy unit of output to track if you’re trying to convince yourself you’re a writer, is not the only thing to optimize for. The quality of ideas matters. Ideas don’t take time The second thing that makes creative work different from moving chunks of iron is that moving chunks of iron takes time. Yes, all of the things leading up to having an idea take time -- we’ll talk about that next. But the act of having the idea takes no time at all. Neuroscientists can look at people’s brains and give them a creative problem. The people can go from being nowhere near solving the problem, to solving the problem, in an instant. Again, sitting yourself down and forcing yourself to come up with ideas is a worthy exercise. It will increase the output of ideas you have, it will build your skill in your craft, and it will increase the chances that one of those ideas is a hit. But you may be just as likely to have that idea while not working at all. Remember Helmholtz’s speech from episode 218, about the Four Stages of creativity? He said his ideas didn’t tend to come to him “at the writing table.” The moment of having an idea takes no time at all. Technically, you could have nearly unlimited ideas in a given “production unit” of time. Actions aren’t linked to immediate results in creative work Now, the third thing that makes creative work different from moving chunks of iron is that, in creative work, actions don’t link to results. By that I mean that if you grip a chunk of iron and pick it up off the ground, you have done work. You have moved that chunk of iron a little closer to its destination. Creative work doesn’t work that way. Say you have an idea for that novel that sells a million copies. Where did it come from? Think about Paul McCartney’s song, “Yesterday.” McCartney famously heard the melody for “Yesterday” in a dream. At first, he was convinced it was a melody he had heard before. He thought it was an old Jazz tune his father had played when he was a kid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCV9oqtwyVA “Yesterday” has stood the test of time as an original song. But musicologists have found numerous similarities to other songs. One such song is called “Answer Me, My Love.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhr94uOdElU “Yesterday”’s lyrics are as such: Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away, Now it looks as though they’re here to stay, “Answer Me, My Love”’s lyrics are as such: She was mine yesterday, I believed that love was here to stay. McCartney didn’t steal from “Answer Me, My Love.” But it’s almost certain that he heard the song before. In 1953, when McCartney was eleven years old, a version of “Answer Me, My Love,” by David Whitfield was the number one song on the UK charts. Then, it got knocked from the number-one spot -- by another version of “Answer Me, My Love,” this time, by Frankie Lane. It was the first time in UK pop chart history that a song was replaced by another version of itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00uPMWDEeZE Was McCartney inspired by this song? It’s impossible to know for sure, but it’s certainly plausible. So this idea you have for a novel that sells a million copies. Maybe you’re in the right state of mind to have this idea because you took a vacation last month. Maybe you’re more relaxed because you got a massage two days ago. Maybe you’re thinking more clearly because you went on a hike earlier that day. Yet it was the funny red hat worn by the woman who walked by the cafe that sparked the idea. Meanwhile, it could have been inspired by some book, buried deep in your unconscious, that your mom read to you when you were three. We’re done with time management Taylorism was the birth of “time management.” It was when we started to look at time as a “production unit.” When we look at time as a production unit, we assume that each additional unit of time we spend doing something will get us the same gain in output as the previous unit of time. But it doesn’t work that way. Even in work as simple as moving chunks of iron, Taylor learned that human energy doesn’t neatly pack together to fill all available time. We have our limits. Today, we’re still treating time as a production unit. Our calendars are filled up with boxes, sometimes overlapping. Jason Fried calls it “calendar Tetris.” We live according to that calendar. “There’s only twenty-four hours in a day,” you’ll hear people say. The conclusion we’re supposed to draw from that is that time is precious, so you better fill it all up. Filling up that time was a big leap forward, but now we need to draw a different conclusion. If there’s only twenty-four hours in a day, that tells you there’s a limit. That tells you that eventually, “time management” is squeezing blood from a stone. When it comes to creative work, that stone is a very fragile stone, indeed. Image: Dynamism of the Human Body, Umberto Boccioni My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/end-time-management/

If I Knew You Better
FREDERICK TAYLOR | Playing Your Own Game

If I Knew You Better

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 14, 2020 67:07


Fred Taylor’s entertainment career approach exemplifies the concept of long-term thinking. In this show, we dig into the complicated legacy of Kobe Bryant, the empire of Tyler Perry and “Hollywood” as both a concept and a place, race and class in and the future of the US (and China), and on winning by playing your own game. We really let it fly, holding nothing back - and I’m sharing it all in its uncut glory. Hope you enjoy!   Tomorrow Pictures: https://www.tomorrowpictures.com Fred Taylor’s previous episode: http://ifiknewyoubetter.libsyn.com/002-frederick-taylor contact me: https://www.crazyinagoodway.com/contact-us

The W. Edwards Deming Institute® Podcast
Deming Lens #32 - Thoughts and People in Systems Thinking

The W. Edwards Deming Institute® Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 30, 2019 21:43


In our 32nd "Deming Lens" episode, host Tripp Babbitt shares his interpretation of wide-ranging aspects and implications of Dr. Deming's theory of management. This week he looks at Dr. Deming and some of the thoughts and people involved in "appreciation for a system." Show Notes [00:00:14] Deming Institute Podcast - Deming Lens Episode #32 [00:01:30] History of Systems Thinking - General System Theory [00:06:23] Systems Thinking - Organizational Structure [00:12:05] Analytical vs. Synthetic Thinking - The Parts vs the Whole [00:14:17] The Aim and Systems Thinking     Transcript Tripp: [00:00:14] This is Deming Lens Episode 32 in this episode, we'll be talking about systems thinking some of the history and people involved in it and then some of the applications of it.   Tripp: [00:00:28] Hi, I'm Tripp Babbitt Host of the  Deming lens and in this episode I want to talk about systems thinking I have over the years read many books on the subject and it is the first of Dr Demings for components that make up his system, a profound knowledge which he talks about appreciation for a system. And I will start with a little bit of history. We'll talk a little bit about organizational structure from a systems thinking standpoint. We'll talk about how our minds are made up of analytical thinking. We'll talk also about Russell Ackoff as an architect. I think it's a great example that he would use. And then the last thing is I want to talk about systems thinking in terms of the aim of an organization.   Tripp: [00:01:30] So let's start with a little bit of history, which is the first of the five pieces of this and the people involved in it. And the original as far as I'm aware, the original thought around general systems thinking came from Ludwig von Bertalanffy Bertalanffy. He wrote a book actually called General Systems Theory. It's an interesting read. I do find it very interesting also that the concept of systems and general systems theory comes from his work in biology. So there was a lot of times I've talked to people over the years and they don't think science should mix with business and organizations and and things of that sort. But I disagree with that from the standpoint of we've learned a lot from science and it does shed light on the way that organizations are put together and how they interact. And as new theories develop, I'm sure that the advancement may come from science. So Bertalanffy may have actually done a seminar or presented a paper that W. Edwards Deming was in attendance.   Tripp: [00:02:54] Now, I have not been able to verify that someone had written that it was actually a professor and I reached out to him and he was not able to find his original notes on the crossover between Bertalanffy and Deming. But I would say since Dr. Deming was knowledgeable about systems thinking that there's a good possibility since the paper that he released was in or had been working on was in the late 1940s, and then he put it in the 50s. So he was presenting a paper, is most likely presenting it before it was put into a book format.   Tripp: [00:03:37] So Bertalanffy is one of those people that really started this this whole movement, at least as I said, as best as I could find. I don't know that you get a lot if you're working on an organization from Bertalanffy, but I will put links out so that you can get a hold of his book. Another person that I read her book was Donella Meadow's, which is Thinking and Systems, and I think it's a good general overview of systems thinking.   Tripp: [00:04:13] And then there is also Russell Ackoff and Peter singing and Russell a cough is probably makes up most of my thinking around systems thinking other than what Dr. Deming wrote as part of a system of profound knowledge. Now, I remember Dr. Deming basically said you don't have to be an expert in each one of the areas of his system or profound knowledge. So systems, thinking, variation, theory, variation, theory, knowledge and psychology. Or knowledge about variation and and psychology. But if you wanted to get deeper, which I enjoy doing, I like to go back. I liked understand the history. I like to understand how things moved over a period of years with regards to the thinking and how is it advancing what we're doing. But Russell Ackoff to me wrote in in a language that I could understand better. Peter Senge wrote some good stuff. And I know people that really get a lot out of his readings. I just didn't get what I needed from Peter Senge. Now, Russell Ackoff wrote a number of books. There's some things I agree with him on. There's some things I disagree with him on. One would be idealized redesign. I think that that systems are not scoped out and then you build to it because I think by the time you build it, it's it needs to be improved. So there has to be this component of almost a dynamic system that's constantly renewing itself as opposed to constantly building models that you have to build to.   Tripp: [00:05:54] But that could be a whole another Deming lens and maybe at some point in the future. So anyway, those are the players that there are many others that are out there have written in. And I apologize. I haven't read everyone's work, but I've read others works. But those people stand out in my mind as probably the most influential. From where I sit on the subject as systems thinking.   Tripp: [00:06:23] Now. The what's what's kind of go with the second part about organizational structure and let's think in terms of some of things I've talked about in the past, which is Frederick Taylor and Taylor ism and talk in terms of how we've built most of our organizations and for all of our technological advancements.   Tripp: [00:06:50] Most organizations are all designed in the same way. We've separated out the pieces that make up an organization like sales and operations and counting and things of that sort. But it's from one perspective, it is all one system that has to work together in order to achieve its optimal ability to work as a system.   Tripp: [00:07:21] So Taylor separated the parts he was working on and thinking in terms of optimizing each of the parts of an of an organization, and this kind of takes me back to something that Ackoff said, which is a system taken apart, loses its essential properties. So it's this whole thinking of if we add up the pieces, if we break them apart and we add them up, then we will get what the system is capable of doing. And we also know from Russell AcKoff, the system is greater than the sum of its parts. There's the interaction of them. And there's actually a good song out there. I was presented by someone who I thought was a systems thinker. It turned out later that they really weren't. But it was a good song, which is Johnny Cash had has a song about building a Cadillac and it called One Piece at a Time.   Tripp: [00:08:31] So taking each of the best parts of a Cadillac from year to year and building the Cadillac from apart from, you know, 1959, 1960 and so forth and trying to build a car from that, I actually put a link in to Johnny Cash's song One Piece at a time, because it's a great representation of the way that we've kind of built organizations in the way that we think about things and in our analytical thinking, which is this is a great Segway into the third part I wanted to talk about, which is systems thinking versus this analytical thinking that we break down things into pieces and it's a natural thing. It's innate. As children, we take things apart, you know, and that's just kind of the way it's built in to a human is breaking those things apart.   Tripp: [00:09:33] The product of analysis is how things work. Not why they work the way that they do. So one of the things I do as I was watching some old Russell Ackoff videos I found was, you know, why was does a car have the engine in the front instead of someplace else in the car? Well, if you break it down a car and you break it out in the different pieces, the door, the engine, and and so it's not gonna tell you why the engine is is in front. What what you have to know or what you have to think in terms of is the system is that the car was originally called a horseless carriage. And so where were horses? Horses were in front.   Tripp: [00:10:20] So we have to be able to take that and understand that that analysis takes you inside the system. But an explanation takes you. Outside the system.   Tripp: [00:10:38] Now, what are the things I didn't know that I find very interesting was that apparently Russell, Ackoff, was an architect, and he said that architects are naturally systems thinkers. Which I thought was was interesting. And he gives us the example of that,  an architect drawls the house first or the building first, the whole. Then he adds the barrooms and the parts and things of that sort. And they go off of an architect would build off a systems principle of it, basically only improve a room in a way that improves the house.   Tripp: [00:11:17] So the house has to be better by virtue of improving a room. But if it takes away from the whole which is the house, then it's something you wouldn't do. In a matter of fact He makes the comment that if he can make a room worse and make the house better, that he would do it as an architect and that the objective was to build the best house, not the best rooms. And actually in this video, he gave a good example. Somebody who had to run up and down the stairs a lot in order to get to the kitchen and take things back upstairs and so forth. And they said, hey, I need a dumbwaiter so that, you know, you put the food in, I can get it up to the second floor without having to run back and forth down the stairs each time.   Tripp: [00:12:05] And with the understanding that that would take away room from the kitchen, making the kitchen worse. But for that system, it made it overall better. And I think these are some of the concepts that most organizations are still missing today is that we're not taking a good look at. These kind of counterintuitive, the counter intuitive nature of some of the things that you find in systems in order to make a hole better. Now, Russell, Ackoff talks in terms of, you know it with analysis that you're taking things apart. You explain the behavior of the part and then you try and aggregate, aggregate and understanding the parts to aggregate understanding of the whole. And this gets in to that. A system is greater than the sum of its parts and analysis does not get us there. What he's presenting instead is synthetic thinking is what is this system a part of? So, you know, one of some of Demings favorite favorite quotes were about buggy whips and carburetors and things of that sort. And in order to be able to look at what what system are you and what broader system are you in, your cars are not in the automobile business. They're in the transportation business. So there are things that can threaten, you know, maybe even drones nowadays that can threaten the way that people transport themselves from one location to another. So the synthetic thinking is what is this this system a part of? Explain that behavior. The second step is explaining the behavior, the containing whole. And then it is disaggregating the understanding of the containing whole. By identifying the role or function of what you're trying to explain in the whole.   Tripp: [00:14:17] So those are two different actually two different ways of thinking for between being an analytical thinker and a synthetic thinker. And the approach that you take on things. Now, this is a good Segue into this last last piece I wanted to talk about, which has to do with Aim. And this is one of the reasons that in what I'm building and what I believe needs to happen in order to understand Dr. Demings system, a profound knowledge is that, first of all, that it is a philosophy and it doesn't give you a step by step. And as I mentioned in the last Heming lens, it's very difficult to grasp some of the things in the Deming philosophy because they are very counterintuitive to belief systems. Two things that are going on in organizations to what you're being taught in your MBA program. I can tell you everything I learned in my MBA program, I had to unwind in my head once I started reading Dr. Demings works and applying some of thinking that's that's in it. So in order to do that, we have to become critical thinkers.   Tripp: [00:15:30] So part of what I'm building in separate activity that I'm doing away from the Deming Institute is how do we look at our organization and look at it as a system and taking you through. And to me, that's a primary step, is being able to look at our organization as a system. And first of all, conclude that at least over 50 percent of the performance you're and organization, whether it's fifty point one percent or 60 percent or whatever it is, comes from the system and not an individual or outside types of of things that are going on within an organization that it's this interaction of the parts that Dr. Deming talked about, the Russell a cough talked about to degree Bertalan he talked about and certainly Donella Meadow's and Peter Senge talk about AI in their teaching. So I don't know how you can write a name, which is the second part of the system that I'm building. And to you have a good understanding of the system and understanding the business that you're in, because if you're out there improving buggy whips and carburetors, you're out of business. You have to understand what business you're in. And by virtue of that, you have to understand the broader system in which you're contained and for automobiles. It is the transportation system. And to be able to write an aim, you've got to have that particular knowledge.   Tripp: [00:17:07] And I don't believe most organizations have enough systems, knowledge in many cases to put together a good purpose or what references aim, which I views mission, vision, values and key measurements as part of what makes up an aim. But it's the systems thinking component that allows you to get the critical thinking that you need. And it's one of things I'm building in order to come up with a way for people to be able to look at their own system and using neuroscience instead of things I've learned from neuroscience too. And ironically, neuro brains, even though phrenology and different types of things, Yale bumps on the head. We've gone through this evolutionary process of learning and neuroscience where, you know, people thought that a bump in the head meant something and was associated. Then we kind of went to this kind of functional orientation, same as Taylor actually breaking down the pieces and saying, oh, well, if you're afraid, it comes from this part of the brain and the fight or flight comes from the amygdala and those types of things. Well, the more that they've studied the brain, you more they there may be functions that are involved in it on a regular basis. But the more that the interaction with the parts of your brain go to go together and operate as a system. So I'm all of this kind of fits together.   Tripp: [00:18:46] And I think that said, there are some interesting other readings going on with regards to neuroscience. But it's the thing I talked about in the last Deming Lens, which is you can't. Argue you can't out logic somebody. They have to learn on their own and giving them experiences, crafting an experience for them to be able to go through so that they can kind of begin to see things differently. And this is just my view on it. Other people have other things. There are people that go to the Redbead experiment and get it right off. I think that they're most likely in the minority. I was one of those and thought everybody would just get it because the logic just kills you. But it's just not that way. And I think looking at your own organization and being able to to look at it and understand it as a system is is certainly a part of this critical thinking. That and crafting an experience for people to get this type of critical thinking will help them understand the Deming philosophy better. So that's really it. I just want to talk about systems thinking some random thoughts I had about how systems thinking is not only part of Dr. Deming's system, profound, profound knowledge, but potentially where maybe he got some of his initial thinking, maybe did sit in on Bertalanffy Seminars are preset presentation of a paper before his book on general systems theory came out, because there's certainly a lot of parallels between some of the things that Dr. Deming wrote and what's in General Systems theory by Bertalanffy. And I've always enjoyed and Russell Ackoff obviously has been in talks and and things with Dr. Deming in the past.   Tripp: [00:20:43] So that's it for this Deming Lens. Hopefully you learn something and if you have comments or something new, maybe you can correct me on which I am correctable. make no apologies for learning, as Dr. Deming would say, but you can reach me at Tripp@Deming.org.   Tripp: [00:21:06] Thank you for listening to the Deming Institute podcast. Stay updated on the latest blogs, podcasts, programs and other activities at Deming dot org.  

WW2 Nation Podcast
Ep 24 - Part Three: Talking Moonlight Sonata - The Luftwaffe Raid on Coventry 14th November 1940 with Frederick Taylor

WW2 Nation Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 18, 2019 36:51


In Episode 24 on the WW2 Nation Podcast, it is our final part looking at Moonlight Sonata with Frederick Taylor. Coming up in this instalment we hear all about the aftermath of the Luftwaffe’s infamous raid and its consequences not only for the city and its inhabitants, but also the fall out for Germany on the international stage, as well as its influence on future operations by both the Luftwaffe and also the RAF Bomber Command. Music Featured: Hearts & Flowers by Jeff Kaale.

WW2 Nation Podcast
Ep 23 - Part Two: Talking Moonlight Sonata - The Luftwaffe Raid on Coventry 14th November 1940 with Frederick Taylor

WW2 Nation Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 12, 2019 32:22


In Episode 23 on the WW2 Nation Podcast we are diving right back into our discussion with Frederick Taylor to discover more about the infamous raid on Coventry on the 14th November 1940 by the Luftwaffe. Music Featured: Hearts & Flowers by Jeff Kaale

Literatur - SWR2 lesenswert
Frederick Taylor - Der Krieg, den keiner wollte. Briten und Deutsche: Eine andere Geschichte des Jahres 1939

Literatur - SWR2 lesenswert

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 10, 2019 4:34


Vor 80 Jahren brach Deutschland den Zweiten Weltkrieg vom Zaun. Doch 1939 hat nicht einmal Hitler den Krieg gewollt, den er bekam - so der britische Historiker Frederick Taylor. Die Regierung Chamberlain hatte lange zu beschwichtigen versucht; die britische Gesellschaft hoffte bis zuletzt auf Frieden. Darauf gehofft h atten bis zum Sommer 1939 auch die meisten Deutschen - bis es der NS-Propaganda gelang, die antipolnischen Ressentiments vollends zu entfachen. Damit hatte Hitler die Deutschen dort, wo er sie haben wollte. Rezension von Michael Kuhlmann. Aus dem Englischen von Helmut Dierlamm und Heide Lutosch Siedler Verlag ISBN 978-3-8275-0113-4 432 Seiten 30 Euro

The W. Edwards Deming Institute® Podcast
Deming Lens #30 - The Problems with Goals, Targets and Quotas

The W. Edwards Deming Institute® Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 6, 2019 17:05


In our 30th "Deming Lens" episode, host Tripp Babbitt shares his interpretation of wide-ranging aspects and implications of Dr. Deming's theory of management. This week he looks at the problems with goals, targets and quotas. Show Notes [00:00:14] Deming Lens - Episode 30 [00:00:32] The Problems with Goals, Targets and Quotas [00:06:35] System Capability [00:09:28] Arbitrary vs. Rational Goals, Targets and Quotas [00:12:48] Financial Targets     Transcript Tripp: [00:00:14] In episode 30 of the Deming lens, we'll take a look at the problems with goals, targets and quotas, including looking at system capability, arbitrary versus rational goals and financial targets.   Tripp: [00:00:32] Hi, I'm Tripp Babbitt, host of the Deming Lens, and this week I'm going to cover the problems with goals, targets and quotas. Now this goes back to my series that I just completed on Demings, Dr. Demings 14 points, which is point eleven, eliminate numerical goals, numerical quotas and embryo substitute leadership. And the reason I'm bringing it back up is because it's been very well publicized lately with a lot of things that are going on, especially around this time of the year with the delivering of packages and things of this sort. But I want to start with a story that I experienced when I was back in college. And a friend of mine came to me and said, hey, guy found a great summer job. We can go and work at RCA. Now, RCA was unionized and he knew somebody in the union and they were looking for extra workers for the summer. And this particular plant that we were gonna be workers at for RCA did vinyl records. And so are we. We signed up. We were paid a lot more than I would have made anywhere else because of the union types of salaries, which was an interesting experience in itself. Not for this. This podcast episode, though. So we went in, we were trained, but the job was fundamentally what I would have called easy to do. And basically what you did is you had a.   Tripp: [00:02:28] Next to a pile of vinyl stock, and you would take this vinyl stock and you would place it on this machine and your hands would go up and grab a couple handles and you would pull the press down on top of the vinyl stock and it would create a record. And that was the job in essence.   Tripp: [00:02:53] And obviously, you would lift it back up. You take the record out, you put it in place and you go on to the next one. Well, I had a quote. I don't remember what the quota was. This is quite a while ago, probably 40 years ago or more. And I remember doing it and I was putting it out. I knew I was working faster than everybody else because I could just see the volume of things that I was doing. And, you know, it wasn't anything I really had to do because once I put the press down, it was timed. So it would automatically go and press the record. Well, I did this for the first couple of days and I came and got paid attention to by management.   Tripp: [00:03:37] And they said, you are creating a lot of rework. You have defects in your vinyl records, and I was like, okay, I'll try and do better.   Tripp: [00:03:55] I didn't really know what to do better. So I went and I continued to do really what I was already doing. I was trying to pay attention, okay, what did I miss? Something. I watched other people. Is there something in them that I wasn't doing that they were doing? And I went through this process and. Lo and behold, they come back to me a couple of days later and they say, hey, your error rate is still twice as high as everyone else's. And I said, hey, look, you know, watch me do the job. And so they watched. And, you know, basically they had no clue it was that I was doing. So I continued to do it and they finally came back to me. After going back and forth, both basically time me, my error rate was still twice as high. I even slowed down. I mean, I thought, well, maybe I'm getting paid attention because I'm in the union. I'm going too fast or something to that effect. But they just basically said, no, you're your area rates twice as high as everyone else. We're sorry. We're gonna to let you go. So I was let go at that point. I was puzzled. I was it was kind of a demeaning experience. And what I found out later from my friend who had continued to work there was the machine that they had put me on, was responsible for a high error rate in the union, knew this, but they were never able to get it fixed to management.   Tripp: [00:05:26] I don't know whether it was a matter of funds or, you know, you could speculate as to what was going on. And so whoever wound up on that machine would have a higher error rate. Well, it sounds ridiculous, but this is kind of the whole thing around code is it's it wasn't a matter of I could certainly put out the volume, but the defects were there because the machine was broken. And, you know, you see a lot of this today. And so when we're looking at quotas and targets and goals and things of that sort. You know, I first think in terms of several things.   Tripp: [00:06:10] One is we'll cover each one of these is the what is the system system capable of doing? Talk a little bit about arbitrary versus rational goals, targets and quotas. And then the third thing I would talk about is the financial defense. Financial targets are outcomes and we use these as goals and things of that sort.   Tripp: [00:06:35] So let's start with the first one, which is system capability. And we looked at the machine that I was working on and it was capable spitting out quite a few, but it was also vinyl records, but it was also capable of creating high defects.   Tripp: [00:06:50] Now, any today I would have gone with that machine and I would have known what the defect rate was had been able to compare. I would have known not to blame the worker, but the main thing was the system. In this case, the machine and myself were not capable of meeting this quota of the number of things because of the high number of defects that I was producing. And so, you know, we see this and this is why I'm doing this particular Deming lenses in this episode is because right now we're in the Christmas season and people are buying gifts and a lot of them are being bought online. You hear these horror stories, not only of porch pirates, but you also hear about people throwing packages. You hear about wrecks that are happening because they're trying to work at breakneck speeds in order to deliver these packages. And so this is kind of the clue of system capability, even hiring more workers. Did they get trained? Who knows? But in essence, the system, the wheels begin to fall off in your in your organization when it's operating beyond its capability.   Tripp: [00:08:14] Now, it might work. Okay. In the short term. So in other words, I could work, you know, 100 hour weeks for maybe a couple weeks before I start to wear out as a human.   Tripp: [00:08:27] And but but working at some of these speeds, you start to see the people throw the packages onto the porch. You see them operate just to be able to meet whatever quota is that they're trained to to do. And this goes for pickers. This goes for fix repair. This goes for every type of industry, really, that I could think of as when a system is working beyond its capability, that that you start to see defects of some sort. And in this case, it might be, like I said, accidents, throwing packages and things of that sort. And bigger incentives to make these things happen, to meet these unrealistic quotas actually make the system. Worse. So the question becomes, how do we need to work on the system and we'll get back to this when we start talking about financial targets and third segment. Well. That's all I really have to say about that.   Tripp: [00:09:28] Now, the second part I want to cover is the arbitrary, the arbitrary versus rational goals, targets and quotas and rash. By rational, I mean that they are things that are tied to a rational goal would be, hey, if we don't get our defects down to 1 percent, we're gonna go out of business. That's that's a rational thing if it's true. You know, we can't compete if we're at 5 percent and everybody else is at 2 percent or 1 percent.   Tripp: [00:10:01] So we have to have certain goals, targets or quotas based upon keeping, you know, staying in business. So what's differentiate between an arbitrary versus a rational goal, target or quota? So arbitrary just means I come up with a number. It's it's what you see a lot of times in strategic planning processes. Oh, next year we're going to grow by 15 percent and off everybody goes. And they tried to meet this arbitrary goal. And oftentimes these things are tied to things like management by objectives. We still see that. I still see it. It's unbelievable. I still see management by objectives in every company. And it's this very Taylor istick. This is Frederick Taylor back in the early nineteen hundreds where, you know, you're given your target and your goal, your objective. And you go out and you meet it and you get typically it's tied to some reward and that that too is tied to Frederick Taylor scientific management. The MBO concept itself came from Peter Drucker and actually when Deming Dr. Deming started railing against it. It was Dr. Drucker that came back and said, basically, that isn't the way I intended for management by objectives the work, but the whole concept regardless. The whole concept is based off of I have objectives. We break down though, the whole pieces. So in other words, if I'm going to go 15 percent increase in sales, what's your responsibility for the Northeast sales region and what is your responsibility for the western region and so forth? And so they're given these arbitrary goals based on it.   Tripp: [00:12:02] And if everybody meets their goal, supposedly everything gets better. Well, oftentimes you find the system that you work in is not the sum of its parts. It it's beyond. That's exponential. What you get the synergistic effect of being able to operate within a system is missing. And so we try to add up these parts, we break them or in this case, we're taking the 15 percent goal in sales and breaking it out by region. OK. You're going to do 10 percent. You're going to do 20 percent, because that's what we believe. These are arbitrary numbers. What we don't know is what the system's capable of. And this kind of leads us really all I have to say about that.   Tripp: [00:12:48] But is the financial targets that are associated with this. So the financial targets typically are, ah, arbitrary. But they're also outcomes, their outcomes of what we create. So it's a scorecard. And, you know, I, of course, hear about the balance scorecard and all those types of things balancing these things. It's to me, it doesn't make a lot of sense. But from a financial target standpoint being an outcome, the question becomes and it's Dr. Demings famous question, that is my favorite phrase, which is by what method? How are you going to achieve these financial targets? How are you going about getting a 15 percent increase in sales? How are you going to have less defects out of a particular manufacturing operation? And these are the things that are missed in when we're looking at numerical goals, quotas and things like weight management by objectives. So I'm hoping that by virtue of you listening, they should go and take a look at your world own organization. Look take a look at some of the goals that you set out. Are they tailoring stickin in nature? Have you taken a piece and then broken it out and then said, Oh, if everybody hits this now, you can go back and listen to Paul Marshall O'Bama companies. We talked about this to suit to a certain extent, which in the context of performance appraisals. But if everybody's hitting their performance appraisal numbers and the company is still going out of business, there is a problem. It's it's the system that needs to be work on. That needs to be improved. And we start to start asking the questions if we've got targets out there, whether they're financial or whatever, are they arbitrary? Are they rational tart targets? You know, and arbitrary. Still, somebody else is going to say, because I get this all the time when I'm talking to companies, there's always somebody in the organization.   Tripp: [00:15:03] I'll say, well, you know, Mike's not arbitrary because it was given to me by my manager. Well, that isn't what I mean. It's arbitrary by nature of the number itself. And do do you have a method to achieve it that you believe will work? And I think this is where people really miss out, is being able to find methods that will achieve the types of things, the types of increases that they're looking for. And it might be an innovation. It might be through failures, which is part of innovation. And you listen to the Doug Hall episodes where we talk about this to great extent about failing in order to get better and finding better methods. And really, the companies with the best methods are the ones that are going to be who wins the competitive battle that is out there between organizations. So so go out. Take a look at your goals, your numerical quotas, take a look at the embryo system if you have it. And I guess a lot of large companies have it. Amazing. But anyway, ask the question, do we have a method to achieve this? And if we don't, maybe we should be looking like looking at that as an organization.   Tripp: [00:16:28] Thank you for listening to the Deming Institute podcast. Stay updated on the latest blogs, podcasts, programs and other activities at Deming dot org.  

WW2 Nation Podcast
Ep 22 - Part One: Talking Moonlight Sonata - The Luftwaffe Raid on Coventry 14th November 1940 with Frederick Taylor

WW2 Nation Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 21, 2019 33:11


In Episode 22 on the WW2 Nation Podcast we are talking with Frederick Taylor as this month marks the 79th anniversary of the infamous Luftwaffe raid on Coventry on 14-15 November 1940 during the height of the Blitz of Britain. Music Featured: Hearts & Flowers by Jeff Kaale

Cold War Conversations History Podcast
The Berlin Wall - Frederick Taylor (93)

Cold War Conversations History Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2019 71:30


Our interview today is with Frederick Taylor, the author of one of my favourite books on the Berlin Wall. Using official history, archive research and personal stories he has produced one of the definitive books on the Berlin Wall.BUY THE BOOK AND SUPPORT THE PODCAST HERENow if you like the podcast you can help to support us for the price of a couple of coffees a month. You’ll be helping to cover the show’s increasing costs and keep us on the air, plus you get the sought after CWC coaster too.Just go to https://coldwarconversations.com/donate/So back to today’s episode - James speaks with Fred who provides some great accounts of his personal experiences in Berlin as well as the story of the Berlin Wall and its eventual destruction. We welcome Fred Taylor to our Cold War conversation…There’s further information on this episode in our show notes, which can also be found as a link in here your podcast app. https://coldwarconversations.com/episode93/If you like what you are hearing sign up to our email list at https://coldwarconversations.com/Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/coldwarpod)

Hollow Leg Podcast
Hollow Leg History | What Happened on This Date, October 7?

Hollow Leg Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 7, 2019 7:28


1571 The Battle of Lepanto takes place as a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of European Catholic states arranged by Pope Pius V, inflicted a major defeat on the fleet of the Ottoman Empire in the Gulf of Patras, in the Ionian Sea off of Greece. The Ottoman forces were sailing westward from their naval station in Lepanto when they met the fleet of the Holy League which was sailing east from Messina, Sicily. The Spanish Empire and the Venetian Republic were the main powers of the coalition, as the league was largely financed by Philip II of Spain and Venice was the main contributor of ships. Lepanto marks the last major engagement in the Western world to be fought almost entirely between rowing vessels, the galleys a direct descendant trireme warships, used since before the Roman Republic. The battle was in essence an "infantry battle on floating platforms", as well as the largest naval battle in Western history since classical antiquity, involving more than 400 warships. The victory of the Holy League is of great importance in the history of Europe and of the Ottoman Empire, marking the turning-point of Ottoman military expansion into the Mediterranean, although the Ottoman wars in Europe would continue for another century. 1780 During the American Revolution, Patriot irregulars under Colonel William Campbell defeat Tories under Major Patrick Ferguson at the Battle of King's Mountain in South Carolina. Major Ferguson's Tory force, made up mostly of American Loyalists from South Carolina and elsewhere, was the western wing of General Lord Cornwallis' North Carolina invasion force. One thousand American frontiersmen under Colonel Campbell of Virginia gathered in the backcountry to resist Ferguson's advance. Pursued by the Patriots, Ferguson positioned his Tory force in defense of a rocky, treeless ridge named King's Mountain. The Patriots charged the hillside multiple times, demonstrating lethal marksmanship against the surrounded Loyalists. Unwilling to surrender to a “band of bandits,” Ferguson led a suicidal charge down the mountain and was cut down in a hail of bullets. After his death, some of his men tried to surrender, but they were slaughtered in cold blood by the frontiersmen, who were bitter over British excesses in the Carolinas. 1849 Edgar Allan Poe, aged 40, dies a tragic death in Baltimore. Never able to overcome his drinking habits, he was found in a delirious condition outside a saloon that was used as a voting place. 1913 In attempting to find ways to lower the cost of the automobile and make it more affordable to ordinary Americans, Henry Ford took note of the work of efficiency experts like Frederick Taylor, the "father of scientific management." The result was the assembly line that reduced the time it took to manufacture a car, from 12 hours to 93 minutes. 1943 Rear Adm. Shigematsu Sakaibara, commander of the Japanese garrison on Wake Island, orders the execution of 96 Americans POWs, claiming they were trying to make radio contact with U.S. forces. 1949 East Germany is created less than five months after Great Britain, the United States, and France established the Federal Republic of Germany in West Germany. The Democratic Republic of Germany is criticized by the West as an un-autonomous Soviet creation, Wilhelm Pieck was named East Germany's first president, with Otto Grotewohl as prime minister. 2001 War in Afghanistan begins as American and British troops began air strikes against Al Qaeda and Taliban targets after the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin-Laden, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and other Al Qaeda operatives, to the United States. Nicknamed Operation Enduring Freedom, the military strikes were part of the so-called Global War on Terror.

What We Talked About in Class
EP10 - What We Talked About in Class - Principles of Management - CH3 History of Management PT1

What We Talked About in Class

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 4, 2019 40:54


Discussion on the history of management, the industrial revolution, Frederick Taylor, scientific management, Henry Fayol, and Max Weber --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Dan Snow's History Hit
The British People and the Outbreak of World War Two with Frederick Taylor

Dan Snow's History Hit

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2019 24:57


Frederick Taylor's work looks at the outbreak of World War Two, and he discusses whether the British people were ready for war. This discussion moves away from traditional debates over Chamberlain to the people of Britain and Germany, and their attitudes to war.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, signup to History Hit TV. Use code 'pod3' at checkout. Producer: Peter Curry See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Channel History Hit
The British People and the Outbreak of World War Two with Frederick Taylor

Channel History Hit

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2019 24:57


Frederick Taylor's work looks at the outbreak of World War Two, and he discusses whether the British people were ready for war. This discussion moves away from traditional debates over Chamberlain to the people of Britain and Germany, and their attitudes to war.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, signup to History Hit TV. Use code 'pod3' at checkout. Producer: Peter Curry See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Cookery by the Book
The Midcentury Kitchen | Sarah Archer

Cookery by the Book

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 30, 2019 30:59


The Midcentury KitchenBy Sarah Archer Intro: Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Sarah Archer: I'm Sarah Archer, and my latest book is The Midcentury Kitchen.Suzy Chase: Remarkably, kitchens changed very little from the ancient world through the Middle Ages. First off, what did the medieval kitchen look like?Sarah Archer: Really, until industrialization, the kitchen was kind of all about the hearth and it was all about the sort of heat source for, to some extent, the house, or the castle. The estate. And kitchens were workspaces. They were, even in the most luxurious houses you can imagine, they were kind of like the stables, like the domain of the household staff. So they may have been extremely well equipped, and that would have meant having lots of tools and having a very large hearth, and a spit to make delicious roasts. All that sort of thing. But they would not have been ever considered kind of comfortable places to be or pleasant places to be. They were extraordinarily hot, they were smoky, and this condition is really one of the things that led inventors to try to develop stoves, because that kind of billowing smoke, you know, is sort of not pleasant for anybody. And it actually sort of inspired the design of houses, with sort of a separate chimney that would sort of whisk the smoke away from the living space.Suzy Chase: And then, in the mid 18th century, Benjamin Franklin invented the Franklin Stove, which was the beginning of enclosed fire.Sarah Archer: That's right. And there were a few iterations of enclosed stoves. Basically it was sort of the cast iron revolution that led to this, and there was the Oberlin Stove, there were all sorts of variations of this that kind of, there were increasing refinements in efficiency and even decoration. They were in some cases very beautiful, and kind of a lovely thing to have in the kitchen, which was sort of a new idea. You know, we think of appliances looking cool or looking nice as just part and parcel of kitchen design, but this was kind of a new lovely thing, that you would sort of have this decorative cast iron object in your kitchen and be freed to some extent from all that smoke. And making that room a more pleasant place to be.Suzy Chase: And then we go to the first refrigerator for the home in 1913. And now that was the real game changer.Sarah Archer: It was a total game changer because it really revolutionized the way people could shop, and the idea that you could stash leftovers, you could sort of plan ahead a little bit. It was normal to sort of have to go shopping for produce or meat or dairy products every day, and the idea that you could kind of, you know, sort of plan your week a little bit with the advent of a refrigerator was revolutionary. Not everybody had them, it was pretty rare to have one when they first came out, just like television or anything else. But yeah, that completely revolutionized shopping and cooking.Suzy Chase: I remember my grandma used to call it the ice box.Sarah Archer: Yes. My mother grew up with an ice box, and it was literally like, the ice man would come to the door.Suzy Chase: Yes.Sarah Archer: With a gigantic block of ice. And that was, you know, I mean, it was probably not as efficient as today's Frigidaire, but it was, yeah. I mean that completely was just a fixture of a lot of peoples homes. And not having a freezer, also, which was rare in the '40s and '50s.Suzy Chase: I love the idea of home economics. Describe domestic science.Sarah Archer: Domestic science is this wonderful, I think of it as being kind of, it's sort of the ancestor of Martha Stewart. Kind of a whole field of study that was very serious, that was taken very seriously, and we tend to kind of giggle at it nowadays, the idea of, we remember our moms or grandmas in home economics class and you think of people with beehive hairdos, making cookies, and it's kind of the idea that you would do that in school seems odd to us nowadays. But domestic science was an outgrowth of a couple of fields of chemistry and food science and hygiene, and there was a lot of concern in the second half of the 19th century. There were people like Catharine Beecher who was the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, with her sister designed kind of the ideal rational kitchen with the idea that increasing industrialization and more people living in cities, it would be, women would really need optimal work spaces. And the idea of kind of separating things, just at the moment when germ theory was coming into play, that kind of, "Oh, maybe it's not a good idea to have raw meat kind of sitting around, where you're also, you know, making bread, and you want to separate these things." And it entered into the school system.Sarah Archer: It also borrowed some logic from the factory. So there's this funny thing where on the one hand, the Victorian home is the sanctuary and it's the place where you come home, you know, your wife and, if you're a man, your wife and children are there and it's cozy and it's sort of away from the dirty outside world of politics and business and all that stuff, and the home is your, you know, kind of peaceful sanctuary from all of that. But a woman named Christine Frederick, around World War I, studied the work of an industrial scientist named Frederick Taylor, I always trip on that a little bit because their names are-Suzy Chase: Frederick Frederick.Sarah Archer: Frederick, there's a lot of Fredericks. Who did motion studies and would kind of work with companies like Bethlehem Steel and kind of say, "Okay, you have workers doing this and that, and you need to kind of, reduce this space by two feet, it'll make it more efficient," and kind of almost look at the choreography of work and say, you know, how can we set up this factory so that it's fewer steps or it's, you know, easier for the workers to do this or that. She applied that to the kitchen, and designed an ideal modern, you know, circa 1916, kitchen that would make it easier for women to get everything done that they needed to do. And this was kind of considered feminism. I mean, we would think of that as being kind of like, you know, regressive, like, why is it making life better for women, because really everybody should pitch in in the kitchen, regardless of gender. But this was really a revolutionary idea at the time. And it paves the way for kind of the work triangle, if you have ever heard of that term for the optimal position of the stove, the sink, and the work top.Suzy Chase: I have to wonder about the fact that she said housework was a profession back in 1912. And how was it received by everyone?Sarah Archer: I think-Suzy Chase: Seems radical.Sarah Archer: It seems radical. It seems, I mean, and it's with the hindsight of 100 years, it's also we see it so differently that it's almost, you know, I mean, she was extremely popular. People loved her book. I don't believe, I have not run across any commentary about her that suggested people thought she was some sort of feminist radical at the time. People didn't, it wasn't kind of like she was a suffragette, in a sense. It was more kind of like, oh, this really smart young women is doing this really cool design. And of course there's the irony that she herself was a professional. Like, she was doing non-domestic work. You know, that was kind of the work of her life, but that was kind of, and that was true for a great many women designers, scientists, chemists, who devoted their professional lives to home economics.Suzy Chase: So, you can't understand the mid-century without looking at the '20s and '30s. Describe the ideal 1920s kitchen.Sarah Archer: So that is really like the golden age of [inaudible 00:08:12]. There is this moment in the '20s when, a couple things are happening. One, after years and years and years of everything being made of wood, maybe kind of a hodge podge of kitchen quote on quote "furniture," you might have sort of a work top, a hoosier cabinet where you kept your flour and sugar, that kind of thing. Suddenly there start to be these kind of bright white enameled surfaces. And it's almost like kitchens start to look like hospitals. There's this real concern around the time of sort of following World War I and the Spanish Flu and real robust understanding of germ theory thinking like, okay, we really need to turn kitchens from these kind of homespun spaces into almost like little laboratories. So the ideal kitchens that you often see in magazines if you look at, you know, House Beautiful and print ads for appliances are kind of almost clinical, and they're not usually brightly colored. So you see lots of tile, lots of surfaces that are easy to clean. And it's funny because they also retain a connection to furniture. So you might see a sink that has sort of lovely tapered capriole legs as though it were a chair or a table. So it doesn't yet look kind of mechanized in the way that it starts to later.Sarah Archer: In the 1930's, all of that changes because streamlining transforms the look of, you know, everything from toasters and pencil sharpeners to cars and refrigerators. And it comes from the automotive industry. The designers of appliances start to borrow the look and feel of streamlining to give these devices the look of something high tech and new. And it's Raymond Loewy's refrigerator, the Cold Spot for Sears, Norman Bel Geddes's designs. A stove that kind of conceals all of the guts so instead of things like the monitor top refrigerator, which is one of the very early sort of popular refrigerators from GE, you can kind of see there's a giant condenser on the top of it and it's kind of this, it looks to our eye very clunky. The '30s appliances conceal all of that, so you don't see kind of all of the machinery. And it has, they have very smooth, you might say elegant, sort of casings. They look almost like the components of a train car, they're kind of styled to look that 1930s deco glam silhouette.Sarah Archer: And this is also the moment when standardized counter heights come into play, and standardized cabinets. So that instead of your kind of personal collection of furniture that can store things, and work tops, you have a kitchen that is kitted out with kind of an intentionally uniform set of cabinets. And that totally transforms the look of the space, and you know, gives it that kind of signature look that we are used to.Suzy Chase: So fast forward to July 24, 1959, where Richard Nixon and Soviet Primer Nikita Khrushchev got into an argument about women, kitchen appliances, and the American way of life. This cracked me up. So during a World's Fair style exhibition in New York City, the two leaders had this conversation.Sarah Archer: It was actually in Moscow, sorry.Suzy Chase: Oh, it was?Sarah Archer: FYI. Yeah.Suzy Chase: That's even funnier.Sarah Archer: It's even funnier, I know.Suzy Chase: So Nixon wanted to show off this spiffy new kitchen and Khrushchev shot back, "We have such things." And then Nixon said, "We like to make life easier for women." And then Khrushchev said, "Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under communism." Talk a bit about this exchange.Sarah Archer: I love this exchange so much. And it's just, it, I think if you look at it in the context of even kind of looking back a few decades to Christine Frederick, you know, Nixon is kind of echoing the home economics theory that all of these new devices and all this industrial innovation is good for women. And of course in the 1950s it is the pinnacle of, you know, men are home from the war, people are buying Levittown houses and nesting and women are at home. Like, capital H, Homemaker. You know, the idea of being, professional is considered a little eccentric at this time period, at best. And Khrushchev is, you know, giving him almost what we would think of as like a feminist argument, that like, you know, you're essentializing. Like, who says women belong?Sarah Archer: And I think it's fair to say that Soviet women, although they were fairly well represented in the sciences, there actually was a fairly high proportion of women working in kind of what we would call STEM, medicine and the natural sciences, in the Soviet Union. It was just as sexist as any place else on Earth, you know, in the 1950s. So the idea that Soviet women were all relying on their husbands to load the dishwasher or what have you, the communal dishwasher, is probably totally ridiculous. But I thought it was very savvy of Khrushchev to kind of zero in on that as a weak point in the conversation.Suzy Chase: In the 1930s, working class women left domestic service in droves, leaving middle class women to take on their own housework. Julia Child described these middle class women as servantless. How did this effect the way households were run?Sarah Archer: So it's a couple things. It's, one is that people who had lots of help before then probably continued to have lots of help. Or, help to some extent. And the idea, this kind of mythical population of people who kind of used to have lots of help and then suddenly didn't and then were left, you know, helpless, not knowing how to, you know, work the stove, I think was relatively small. What was more common was for people who had been working class or working poor to start to become more successful and have more means in the post war period. And to have a brand new kitchen, if they bought, you know, a Levittown house, or were living out in the burbs somewhere. And suddenly be living a new lifestyle, and in a sense they were a new kind of person. They were the American middle class, that kind of bedrock of middle class people that was booming in the post war era.Sarah Archer: So servantless is kind of a brilliant term because it describes, in a sense, a new kind of person. So, somebody who perhaps, you know, would not have thought to entertain a lot decades earlier. Maybe in the 1950s and '60s they're reading about fondue and maybe think it would be fun to have people over, and their kitchen is attractive and maybe in kind of a fashion color, so you can sort of have people over for informal dining in your kitchen in this kind of new way. So it transformed the lady of the house, shall we say, to use an antiquated term, into a new kind of hostess, I would say. And women's magazines really played into this. There is a lot of advice in the '50s and '60s about entertaining in this kind of way. Things that you can do ahead, if you're kind of doing it all yourself. And you know, foods that keep, which is the signature culinary innovation of the post war era. Things that you can kind of leave for a couple days.Sarah Archer: And ways that you can kind of dazzle people, you know. Sort of exploring different kids of culinary traditions that we would not think of as terribly exotic now, but you know, 70 years ago were magazine worthy because of their novelty.Suzy Chase: Speaking of foods that will keep, talk about the innovation of Tupperware.Sarah Archer: Oh my goodness. This is one of my favorite things. I was fascinated by the idea of the Tupperware party. Because this is something that, by the time I was a kid, I was, that had, all that stuff had kind of fallen out of favor and it was kind of getting back to, let's use glass because it's better for you, or better for the environment. And of course as a child of the '80s I was kind of like, obsessed with plastic and thinking, what are these Avon ladies and Tupperware parties, what is this world that existed 20 years ago?Suzy Chase: Yeah.Sarah Archer: The plastic that is used to make them was a World War II innovation, and it had originally been used to protect wires in telecommunications. And like so many things, it was kind of like at the end of the war, what do we do with this? You know, what civilian peace time application can we come up with? And Earl Tupper designed the first Tupperware. And one of the reasons for the parties is because that smell of that sort of plasticy smell that we are all very used to because it's all around us all the time was totally alien to people in this time period because there just was not a lot of plastic on the market. People were kind of not super into it. They were kind of like, oh, I don't know, is this safe, or it's just weird, it doesn't really go well with food. So the parties were a way of showing it and kind of almost like, playing with it in a domestic setting. Like you can, you know, this is how you could use it if you bought some, in somebody's house. And so it became kind of like Avon, sort of a kind of domestic retail fixture of the time period.Suzy Chase: So I thought this was another game changer. Describe the change in mentality in terms of thinking about durable goods as consumable.Sarah Archer: Oh yeah. This is another big one that actually is like, like so many things about the post war era, is secretly really from the '20s, and there's this long kind of decades long gap between the modernism and kind of industrial thinking of the '20s because of the Depression and the World Wars. There was an advertising man, sort of a mad man, so to speak, of that era, the 1920s, named Earnest Elmo Calkins who wrote a book called Consumer Engineering during the Depression. And basically it was a manifesto for planned obsolescence. And he was arguing that things like toothpaste and shaving cream that you kind of naturally use up, we need to start thinking of durable goods as things that you can use up. So a new color or a new shape or a new feature, you know, new and improved, all of that stuff. We have to start kind of baking in those qualities, otherwise people won't buy things as often as we would like them to. So the advent of annual styling, which was really big early on in the auto industry, where you would have, you know, a whole new pallette of cool colors every year and new fins, or new features, cup holders, you know, in cars, takes over kitchen appliances.Sarah Archer: And this is partly because weird though it may sound, there was a strong connection between the auto industry and the world of kitchens. General Motors owned Frigidaire during this time period. And if you went to Motorama to see all the new concept cars you might also see the Kitchen of Tomorrow and see, you know, all the features. So they were presented as being kind of part and parcel of the design innovation and the new styling and the idea that there's a new color palette that's must-have for the kitchen. And as a result of that, if you're looking at old houses, which we were a couple years ago in Philly and it was sort of immediately like, oh, this is like 1968. Or this is 1972. You can tell because of the appliances, because there was such a kind of, it's like archeological layers. Like you can tell when a kitchen was done just by looking at the color.Suzy Chase: On page 206 you have an incredible photo of the classic brown and orange kitchen in the Brady Bunch House.Sarah Archer: Oh, I love Brady Bunch House.Suzy Chase: I was so excited to hear that HGTV was going to renovate the home to its original splendor. That show kind of brings home the fact that life happens in the kitchen, don't you think?Sarah Archer: Absolutely. And that is, when I was working on this book I immediately, I started thinking a lot about all the different TV shows where that, the standard kind of set where you have like, a bisected apartment or house, very often features the kitchen. And if you go way back to like, I Love Lucy, there's you know, a lot of like, the funny gags happen in the kitchen. But the Brady Bunch to be is quintessential because it's almost at the center. And because there are so many kids, it is a perfect illustration of the way that the kitchen became a living space. And so it wasn't just a place to make toast in the morning or make dinner, it was, you know, science experiments and homework and having a heart to heart talk, and you know, playing games. And you know, doing baking experiments and all that, all the kind of shenanigans that the kids get up to on the show, so much of it happens in that kitchen. And becomes kind of almost like a creative lab for the kids to kind of do their thing. Which I think was true for a lot of people, and still is.Suzy Chase: I want to talk to you about a couple of the cookbooks featured in this book. There's the Can Opener Cookbook.Sarah Archer: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Suzy Chase: A guide for gourmet cooking with canned or frozen foods, and mixes. By Poppy Cannon. I love that name.Sarah Archer: Cannon. The great, do you know her backstory?Suzy Chase: No.Sarah Archer: She has a fascinating backstory. She honestly is worthy, I feel like, of a Netflix series. Her life, she's from South Africa, or she was from South Africa. She was a white South African who moved to the US. She ended up in a romantic affair with a man who was very high up in the NAACP, and this was considered very, he was African American.Suzy Chase: Oh.Sarah Archer: It was, yeah. So she was kind of in, not exactly in the scandal pages, but she was kind of a person of note in the news, on top of being a cookbook editor, or a food editor, and writing all these books. And it was all about kind of being glamorous and saving time. And she, you know, if there are photos of her that she was very chic and you know, always had really cool hairstyles, and it is in certain ways like the anti-1950s cookbook. But at the same time it's almost perfect. So on the one hand, and it gets to this tension between, you know, we want you to be in the kitchen all the time because that's your job as an American housewife and mom, but all of these innovations that we want you to buy are going to make it easier for you. So it's sort of like, walking that line between making it, you know, not too easy. Just a little bit more easy. And Poppy Cannon is, takes it to the Nth degree and just says, like, why? Why bother making things from scratch when you can just create, you know, a complete meal from shelf stable food?Suzy Chase: A cookbook that I have: Dishes Men Like, from 1952. And I made the 30 minute noodle goulash that's on page 39.Sarah Archer: And was it good?Suzy Chase: It was kind of bland.Sarah Archer: I'm not surprised, yeah, in 1952. I mean it's, this is sort of the era when people maybe had salt and pepper in the house and not a lot of other spices and flavors.Suzy Chase: But this cookbook was kind of weird. Because I thought the premise was cooking for your man. But in the introduction, they wrote, "If you have a husband who likes to cook, pamper him." I thought that was a weird way to kick off a book for that era.Sarah Archer: Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like they kind of weren't sure what they were trying to say, in a way. It was like, we want to sell this and we know that men like to eat. So let's, right.Suzy Chase: So then there was the advent of foreign or exotic cookbooks, like the Art of Chinese Cooking from 1956, or Good Housekeeping's Around the World Cookbook from 1958.Sarah Archer: Around the World.Suzy Chase: Or, Simple Hawaiian Cookery, from 1964. That cracked me up.Sarah Archer: Isn't that fascinating? Yeah. And there are oodles of these, and there are all sorts of, it is, it's kind of the confluence of the Worlds Fair culture of kind of sampling these quote on quote exotic foods that you might try at the different pavilions. Which I think is made permanent at Disneyland and Disney world. Those are kind of like permanent Worlds Fairs that never close. And this idea that you could kind of travel the world by, you know, going to Queens for an afternoon. And you know, sampling all these things, which were of, you know, probably dubious authenticity. But that kind of to me really fits into the kind of gamesmanship of being a hostess. And like, this is new and different, you haven't had this before.Sarah Archer: And also kind of the legacy of World War II geographically, because so much of it is about the South Pacific and what would have been called the Far East at the time. Looking at Asian cuisine. And nowadays, there's practically, you have multiple options for hipster Korean fast food, you know. Like we have so much, you know, such an array of incredible food that we can get, even in medium sized cities and towns in this country. That the idea of being able to order, you know, Cambodian takeout in 1950 would have been unheard of. But I think it speaks to a real curiosity, and I think that it was kind of like, I think of the post war kitchen as kind of a stationary laboratory for exploring the world.Suzy Chase: So let's talk a minute about Julia Child. In the book you wrote, "Child traveled the world, lived abroad, worked for her country during wartime, and learned to cook in one of the strictest culinary traditions on earth. So for her, the mid century kitchen was not a place where industrial designers had shown mercy on her. To make her inevitable lot in life easier. To save her from becoming a worn out Mrs. Drudge. It was a creative place full of exciting challenges and good smells, good tastes, and it was where she wanted to be." Talk a bit about that.Sarah Archer: So she has, to me, one of the most fascinating life stories. And I think, it's also an example of this kind of intersection of kitchen and class. She did not grow up cooking, because her family had help. She came from a very well to do background in California, and had, was highly, highly educated and was, you know, in the precursor to the CIA during the war. And so had kind of a world view that was very uncommon for an American, much less an American woman of her generation. You know, a degree of travel and kind of cosmopolitanness that was very unusual. But then decided to bring that to the masses by kind of putting her kitchen on TV. And I think one of the things that I love about her kitchen, which you can visit at this Smithsonian, and it's amazing.Suzy Chase: I love it.Sarah Archer: It's so great. It's just, everybody should go there. Is that it was actually not, it was really not like a kitchen of tomorrow or a kitchen of the future. You know, it didn't have that kind of Jetsons feeling of kind of the latest and greatest. She had, you know, the iconic peg board. All her different kind of nifty kitchen tools that were, some of them quite low tech, you know, just the old fashioned whisk. All that kind of good stuff. And it was not about innovation so much as mastery. And I think that she's an example of somebody who showed women that there was a real kind of pleasure, sensory pleasure, and kind of cultural interest in learning to cook. That it wasn't, it didn't have to be about, I mean, to some, it does have to be about getting dinner on the table at a certain, you know, hour, if you have lots of kids, but that it could also be intellectual. It could be challenging. It could be fun for you. And I think that certainly my mom responded to that, watching the show when it was on PBS, and that was, you know, it's a way of learning about another culture, to learn through their food.Suzy Chase: In 1963, the same year the French Chef premiered, Betty Friedan identified the housewife as the chief customer of American business.Sarah Archer: I find it so interesting that this happened in the same year. And not too far after the Nixon Khrushchev debate. So Friedan was looking at kind of the consumer industrial complex and essentially that same planned obsolescence scheme that Earnest Elmo Calkins devised during the Great Depression. It was that you must always be, for the market economy to work, waiting and wishing for the next thing. In order for, you know, sales to be robust, you have to always be longing for a better dishwasher. Or waiting for a washer dryer. Or hoping that you can, you know, change out the light fixtures in your kitchen, or whatever it is. And that that, getting swept up in that longing, is, you know, kind of, if you're not interested in that sort of thing, which a lot of people are not, you know, naturally, is not a substitute for a full life. And she was sort of making the point that, you know, there is more to life than, you know, this kind of obsessive perfectionisms around food and design.Sarah Archer: The irony of this is that she became an avid amateur cook throughout the '60s and early '70s. And there's actually an article called Cooking with Betty Friedan, and it's about her, you know, rediscovering the joy of making soup or something. Really it's kind of, and it's presented as this kind of, you know, like, really? Her of all people? But I think that speaks also to this tension around women in that era who were chafing against the kind of, the societally prescribed roles for women, but also maybe really loved food and loved to cook. And you know, can you do both, can you be both?Suzy Chase: So now for my segment called My Last Meal, what would you have for your last supper?Sarah Archer: Oh wow. That's such a great question. I probably, I think my desert island food genre is probably Italian food. And I think if I had to choose, I have a, we have a, we make Marcella Hazan's bolognese sauce, that was kind of our go to sauce. So probably I would do the tagliatelle with bolognese. Maybe a nice salad to go with it.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Sarah Archer: So my website is www.sarah, S-A-R-A-H,-archer, A-R-C-H-E-R, .com, you can find me on Twitter at S-A-R-C-H-E-R, sarcher, or on Instagram at sarcherize, S-A-R-C-H-E-R-I-Z-E.Suzy Chase: Thanks Sarah, for this fascinating glimpse into the mid century kitchen, and thanks for coming on Cookery By the Book Podcast.Sarah Archer: Thank you so much for having me, it was really fun.Outro: Follow Suzy Chase on Instagram, at cookerybythebook, and subscribe at cookerybythebook.com or in Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening to Cookery By The Book Podcast. The only podcast devoted to cookbooks since 2015.

Mind Your Noodles Podcast
Charles Green - The Trusted Advisor

Mind Your Noodles Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 10, 2019 57:21


Neuroscience experts, practitioners, research and methods for making brain-friendly organizations and healthy individuals. Subscribe to Mind Your Noodles!   This is the fifth episode of the Mind Your Noodles podcast. In this episode Charles Green, author of The Trusted Advisor discusses neuroscience utility and ways to build trust in your organization.    Show Notes [00:00:06] Mind Your Noodles Podcast - Episode 5 [00:01:58] Dale Carnegie. . . Deeper [00:05:07] The Philosophy of Trust [00:06:13] Neuroscience - Does It Applies to Organizations? [00:08:29] The Argument Against [00:11:49] A Descriptive Analogy [00:40:48] Forget Neuroscience -  What Should We Do? [00:44:49] Women are Trusted More Than Men [00:46:15] Nurses Most Trusted [00:52:00] The Power of Story   Transcript Tripp: [00:00:06] Take care of The brains that take care of you. with the Mind Your Noodles podcast will keep you up to date on the latest neuroscience research and practices to keep your brain healthy. And strategies to help your organization be brain friendly.   Tripp: [00:00:27] Hi I'm Tripp Babbitt with Mind Your Noodles and our guest today is Charles H. GREEN He is an author who has written many books one which is one of my personal favorites which is the trusted advisor which I believe was written in around 2000 or so. So maybe we should just kind of start there Charles a little bit about you and you've written that looks like three books. You had a field book and then you also had a more recently the trust based selling book. But like I said the Trust Advisors is I'm sure one that's held by a lot of people whether they're in sales or consulting or really any field where you're you're having to deal with people on a daily basis. I'll let you take it from here. Yeah   Charles: [00:01:16] Well that's that's basically right. The whole three books share the common theme of trust in business. A trusted advisor you right came out 2001 that was the first trust they signed in 0 5 and The Trusted Advisor field book. I think about 2013 and the trusted advisor is kind of the one that you know I made my mark with. That's that's the core branding. Not that I check it frequently but as of this morning it was rated about number 7000 on Amazon which was compared to all millions of books it's up against Harry Potter and it's continued to have that level of popularity. So I'm I'm quite happy to have a book that's performed that well that's excellent.   Tripp: [00:01:58] It's it's well written and you know it's interesting I was looking actually on Amazon about you know different reviews people had on it and I thought some of some of the folks out there kind of gave it a good explanation at least for me. Hopefully you like it as a compliment to which is it's it's kind of a deeper Carnegie's Win Friends and Influence People.   Tripp: [00:02:22] There's a lot more to it.   Tripp: [00:02:23] There's a lot more that you can apply into settings maybe that's not a good explanation but I don't know that I thought when I read that I thought Well that's thoughtful and a few other people kind of jumped on that comment.   Charles: [00:02:38] Yeah I think it's fair and I take it as a as a compliment. I think another thing that people find when I am my people in my organization give workshops or keynote is a common takeaway from people is sort of. It's not like I didn't really know that. I guess I kind of knew that but I never put it all together in a coherent thread like that. So I don't claim novelty but I do think it's knitted together a whole bunch of very common themes so I think it's a good company. Thank you.   Tripp: [00:03:09] Yeah. And I have to say also you practice what you preach to as we exchanged e-mails over a few series of days not only did you spend time with thoughtful responses to some of the e-mails that we shared but also the way that you used a a compliment being very specific which is one of the things out of the book I thought was was you know it's just interesting how some people will that they write something but then they don't really live it. But I could tell that you really live the the books that you wrote.   Charles: [00:03:44] Well I've had 19 years to practice it and you know there is no upper limit to to perfection in an area like trusting or being trustworthy. So it's a constant struggle. But yeah over time you can get better at it.   Tripp: [00:03:59] Absolutely. One of the things I want to kind of interject in this conversation as you know we when we were exchanging e-mails you were talking about W. Edwards Deming and you know he's had different influence on people you know Pixar Bama companies Paula Marshall that make the apple pies for McDonald's and and different folks. And I was you were familiar with Deming which not everybody has but I have a tendency to be people at least my age and up I have a tendency to know who at least who Deming was. What your knowledge of that. Dr. Deming and his work.   Charles: [00:04:37] Gosh it's it's not deep and it's it's old I haven't looked into this material in years but what I'm left with is a tremendous amount of respect. He was obviously somebody who had a great idea somebody who was devoted to it somebody who was very good at explaining and had a great deal of impact. So you know I do not claim any in-depth concrete knowledge about it but you know the core message is brilliant and very well said from what I recall.   Tripp: [00:05:07] Yeah his his his last book The New Economics basically addressed looking at an organization as a system theory vague theory of variation theory knowledge and psychology. We're kind of the cornerstones of of his particular work and you know I remember when I. First read the trusted advisor was kind of a combination of things that it kind of brought back come some epistemology type things in my head. And it also brought in some of the psychology piece even though you don't really overtly mention that it seems to be some of that underpinning the writings of that book. Is that a fair assessment.   Charles: [00:05:50] Absolutely. It's very much there. And I think what we what we intended. I was one of three authors on that book and what we intended was to let those kinds of conclusions reveal themselves to the reader so rather than preaching you know here's how you should relate to your kids or your spouse. We said let's let let's let that one emerge to the reader. And it is pretty obvious. It's definitely there.   Tripp: [00:06:13] Ok. So I'm just going to kind of jump into one of the reasons that I came across you and your work again was there was a post that you made or a comment that you made it was very strong. And it's because we're covering off in this particular podcast about neuroscience and it's an application to organizations. One of the things that that you kind of addressed very directly was you didn't you don't necessarily see it that way and some of the people that I've already talked to like Dr. Zak different folks you know are bringing this into organizations and it gave me pause when I read your comment and I thought you know if this is going to be a podcast this podcasts really needs to be about perspective and you offer a different perspective on the usefulness of neuroscience philosophically as you mentioned in your in our emails and our communications back and forth but what kind of give me would set the foundation here for what it is that you see and why you. You have have some such strong feelings about it maybe and this is a few years ago. So to be to be fair this is maybe you've changed your mind or maybe you've dug in deeper I don't know. So I just you whenever somebody gives me a strong reaction and not just the reaction of Oh that that's baloney or something like that but more a thoughtful response I say you know like I said it gives me pause and I want to understand what it is that you see and to be fair to the audience as we start to look at you know neuroscience. Does it have application to organizations right.   Charles: [00:07:59] Well I mean good for you for seeking out you know different perspectives to answer a little question there and probably Doug and a little bit deeper. I think my background I got a graduate degree MBA Harvard Business School many years ago my undergraduate degree was in philosophy. As a matter of fact in my class at HP as eight hundred people only two of us had a philosophy degree and I was one of them. And so that's kind of a schizophrenic background.   Charles: [00:08:29] You know those two. And and in my career I think the value of a degree in philosophy early on in my career was somewhere between none and zero. It's just not what it was that even a mistake. In fact the more more my career progressed the more I began to see the applicability of it. And this subject is really a good example. Feel free to interrupt me here as we go through the tour Tripp. I guess basically I approach the issues of neuroscience as applied to leadership and business from the perspective of philosophy of science and that deals with things like what is an explanation. What is causality et cetera et cetera. Let me just say upfront I'm not an expert in neuroscience as we've already seen I'm not an expert in Deming but I do know a few things about business and I do know a few things about how to talk about the intersection of business psychology management leadership and all those things. And what has struck me about the subject of neuroscience applied to business it's not unique to that field.   Charles: [00:09:41] It happens when you get people who are deep into the let me call it hard science and I know that at the microscopic level physics is always sort of the paradigm of air quote you know good science there is a temptation among people who are really skilled deep in the hard sciences to want to apply the same kind of principles techniques perspectives into the quote softer areas I'm going to be using a lot of air quotes here.   Tripp: [00:10:09] Oh that's OK.   Charles: [00:10:11] And I think it leads to a couple of problems and I'll call them philosophic but they're they're very real. One of them is the notion of explanation. So for example and again I'm not deeply familiar with either Zen. Or Iraq. But I'll I'll sort of key off.   Charles: [00:10:30] Zak wrote an article in Harvard Business Review about a couple of years ago and you can see very much he says I'm going to describe how neuroscience causes certain factors in management behavior. Right there. Anybody who had training in philosophy when you see the word cause you should know red flag. I go back to David Hume and anybody with philosophy signs you can't prove causation in the sense of the word that we normally mean by proving that I would fault the editor HBR are they shouldn't it like that. You could have said what he intended. In a much cleaner way. So there's that little issue you can't really prove causation. Much more importantly though in casual language hard scientists tend to say things like well we can explain management behavior by delving into the neuroscience of it and I'll speak very broadly. You know the neuroscientists people in this case are measuring levels of oxytocin or they're doing brainwave scans and what they're saying is this explains people's behavior or management behavior or leadership behavior. So my problem lies right there. I would argue it doesn't really explain hardly anything in any useful way. And let me give a humble example.   Charles: [00:11:49] If I were in the room with you Tripp I would put my right hand out in front of me six inches above the table top with my fingers lightly flexed and raised my hand by one foot. So it's a foot and a half off the table. Now let me suggest there is an infinite number of ways to describe what I just did. You could say I raised my hand you could say I was acting out the toast that I gave as best man at a recent wedding. You could say I was flexing the muscles. You could say that my brain was sending certain signals via complicated biochemistry that then triggered certain muscles and so forth and sort you could say I was giving a signal. There's an infinite number of ways to describe what I just did. And it's not that one of them is more accurate or more right or more truthful it depends on the situation. If I actually were at a wedding and what I did was you know raised my hand with a glass in it in a toast. That's what you'd want to say. You know Charlie toasted the group.   Charles: [00:12:53] It's useless to describe what I just did in biochemical terms and yet I think people well schooled in the hard sciences tend to believe well the more deep we can get into the physical explanations of the better the explanation. There is a name for that is called the reductionist problem in philosophy and it's the belief that always the deeper you can get the better the explanation is.   Charles: [00:13:17] Well that makes a lot of sense in chemistry. I makes a lot of sense in physics. You know it's when I when I grew up you know the ultimate source of reality where atoms which could be broken into neutrons protons and electrons didn't know anything more you know. Science has advanced since then. Science advanced past Newton and we would now say the ultimate reality is not explained by Newtonian physics you got to get into quantum mechanics and so forth and so the fact in the daily world that's useless. And you know if I swing a bat and hit a ball Newton is just fine to describe that. If I walk into the pathway of a street I'm likely hit by a car and Newtonian physics is perfectly adequate to describe that. So it's only in certain settings where we're very careful if we want to talk about the nature of ultimate reality in the universe it's very appropriate to bring in all these other perspectives and to bring it back home here. If you're going to talk about things in management leadership and business things like recognizing excellence giving people discretion sharing information building relationships these are all sub topics that Zak wrote about in his HP article I would argue that the choice of the neuro chemical language to describe that is pretty much useless. We don't need neuroscience to talk about the notion of leadership or motivation. In fact it's it's it's beside the point it's distracting.   Charles: [00:14:48] So to me defaulting to that micro level of explanation for all explanations is a fairly low level of explaining our sorry. Description is a fairly low level of explanation and description by reducing things to the lowest physical common denominator becomes really useless and useless.   Charles: [00:15:08] So that's the essence of my concern with it we're using one language to describe phenomena which are frankly practically speaking far better described in other languages. So it's akin to saying well should this concept be better expressed in German or in French. Well when you're talking about leadership it doesn't matter. There's certain area. That might be very important but most management and leadership subjects I suggest are very well dealt with with fairly much common language and not by default to some supposedly superior notion of biochemical language. So let me stop there and see if that makes sense.   Tripp: [00:15:46] Yeah. No i i i falling as best I can. I did it not I don't have a philosophy of real depth as far as that.   Tripp: [00:15:55] I've read some of the stuff that Dr. Deming read you know where as he was going along and getting associated with the pistol melody portion of it but there's a few things that you I wrote down as as you were talking in the first one was this this kid the concept of causation versus correlation you didn't mention correlation but just just to mention it you know just because more murders in the summer doesn't mean that summer causes murders you know type of thing.   Charles: [00:16:22] Yeah correct.   Tripp: [00:16:24] And so there's a difficulty which kind of leads me to the second thing I wrote down which is anytime we're doing dealing with science we're in essence and Dr. Deming used something called PDSA which is plan do study act. We know that we're kind of in a scientific setting and just because we have one instance of something happening doesn't prove anything forever. It just means in that circumstance and that's kind of when as you were talking about you know the hand above the table I'm sitting there thinking OK you know from a scientific standpoint we can't draw conclusions about things based off of even multiple experiment experiments of metaphor. One of Dr. Deming is famous saving sayings was no theory has ever proven.   Charles: [00:17:09] Right. So it's he's philosophically exactly correct.   Tripp: [00:17:13] Okay. Okay. And so you know from that standpoint I gather that you know and I and I as I hear you talk and I'm kind of putting the pieces together and there is a third thing that you mentioned in there and I kind of remind me of you know Frederick Taylor versus what Deming taught. So you've got kind of this Taylor mystic thinking during the Industrial Revolution about you know pound whatever you can out of people pay Papa those types of things and Dr. Deming came in and redid all that and now actually was that kind of same transformation from Newtonian you know thinking to quantum physics. I mean it was a whole new level of of thinking and I guess where I get kind of stuck you know as I hear you talk and you say I have some of that logic associated with it. And again probably not the depth you have  I know I don't.   Charles: [00:18:08] Believe me I've forgotten 90 OK.   Tripp: [00:18:10] I'm still working on the two percent you that you know. So the.   Tripp: [00:18:16] But logically there are certain things that I as a read them kind of makes sense and I don't know if it's a familiarity thing or what it might be. But for instance when Dr. Zak talks about the fact that you know you raise as you become an executive you know you raise up through all the levels and you get this power and the testosterone starts kicking in. And in essence you lose empathy. I find that useful from a scientific standpoint does it apply to everyone. Probably not. But. But is it something that would be useful for people to know. I think so and I've and I've heard others that are in kind of the neuroscience field kind of support kind of what Zak's saying. So you know I'm hearing that. So are you countering that type of thing or is it is it something else that that you're you're taking from an argument perspective from an art.   Charles: [00:19:15] It is something else. I don't disagree with that finding. OK. And sort of empirically obvious to me as a manage. Kids huh. But you know hey more more proof. What the heck. That's that's fine. What I'm here arguing about is an example I'm looking at Dr. Zak's article in front of me just to refresh my memory. And he in this article in Harvard Business Review he says quote I identified eight management behaviors that foster trust. These behaviors are measurable and can be managed to improve performance. Close quote. And those eight behaviors are. He calls them behaviors no one recognize excellence. Number two induce quote challenge threats unquote. Number three give people discretion in how they do their work. Number four enabled job crafting. Number five. Share information broadly. Number six intentionally build relationships. Number seven facilitate whole person growth. Number eight show vulnerability. Now those are all you know we understand in plain English we understand what those mean and what he's done what he says he's done in his research. Remind me to come back and comment on the research. OK. But what he what he suggested is that. They've been able to measure different levels of oxytocin in association with these kinds of phenomena. I have no problem with that whatsoever. I'm just saying. Who needs that to talk about. Give people discretion you know share information broadly intentionally build relationships and be vulnerable.   Charles: [00:20:44] Poets have said as much every management consultant I know would say as much people 30 40 50 years ago who were very well respected in business sent as much without any need for any benefit from oxytocin or or neuroscience.   Charles: [00:21:01] What I'm arguing about is the utility the value brought to this set of observations by the field of neuroscience it seems to me pretty minimal. It's like I knew this. This is second grade stuff. Not that it's not important. Believe me. I mean he's absolutely right and picking on these issues for example show vulnerability. That's huge. And in the work that I do and trust that's one of the leading things. My question is why did I need to know that proven through some biochemical study. I don't. And not only that it's it's worse if you actually bring it in demand. What do you do with that observation to say you know chemicals are associated with a certain vulnerability. It's akin to in my experience when some people say well can you make money with trust. You know how do I know it's going to be profitable. Never mind wonder. That's the wrong way to talk about trust. People who ask that question frankly are not going to be persuaded by however much data you could throw at it anyway. And I think the same is true here. If if somebody is questioning why should I be vulnerable citing the evidence of oxytocin levels is very unlikely to convince them. So what's the use of it. If you're a professional advisor a management consultant a financial advisor it's just not a very powerful argument. You know more powerful arguments are well so and so over here in out or think about the Oracle of Omaha you know. Here's what he did. Storytelling is more useful. Drawing on analogies is more useful surveys are more useful way down the list it is let me describe the chemical reaction that happens in people's heads when this issue comes up. So it's really an argument about utility and role and relevance.   Tripp: [00:22:46] When you say utility I think application is that.   Charles: [00:22:49] Yes.   Tripp: [00:22:49] OK. So. So in essence it's kind of like it's not showing us really anything new it may be showing us that the science says that it's something that that's there but it's not telling us anything that we didn't already know.   Charles: [00:23:06] Yes OK in a nutshell that's it. OK. Telling us anything we didn't already know. And furthermore it's not particularly useful in explaining things that even the people know. Okay. So yeah.   Tripp: [00:23:18] Okay. Yeah. I you know I sit there and as I reflect on you say I'm Deming's thinking and I'm trying to pull together some of the or you know theory of knowledge piece or philosophy piece with the only psychology piece which which you do definitely write to you don't see that neuroscience as an advancement on the psychology piece or giving us key insights about how people behave and why they behave that way.   Charles: [00:23:52] That's correct. And it is nothing to do with truth. I mean a description of a phenomenon like me raising my hand a biochemical description of that is 100 percent as accurate as a poetic description or a an argument from me understanding something in context. It's not a question of right or wrong. It is a question of relevance and impact and power.   Tripp: [00:24:13] Okay. All right. So I did so and I'm just going to kind of kind of go back through things because you're giving me a different way of looking at things this way. As your as your email did there.   Tripp: [00:24:25] There's also a gentleman by the name of Orin Clark. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He wrote a book called Pitch Anything.   Tripp: [00:24:33] So he's a guy who's a who is basically in the world of getting money for ventures basically. Right. So might be for movies some might be for business. It could be anything but he is basically that that's his common role and when it thinks he discovered and he was one of kind of first turned me on to all this is you know here are the reasons and there's a lot of it could be an interesting read for you. I'd be curious does that. Oh I don't get. Yeah. What what you're thinking is I. But he kind of pulled in you know the three parts of the brain. He talks about the crocodile brain the bad brain the neocortex and. And that when you're when you first meet somebody you know it's kind of like a fight or flight thing like that first e-mail I say to you you know do I want to write you know what I want to take this on or do I want to you know which. Which way do you want to go and how do I present. I think a lot of the strategies they had in the Trusted Advisor help mitigate some of those issues associated with that because the whole thing is about the things you've already talked about authenticity and those types of things. But he in essence took that process of pitching you know for money and different things and took parts of what I hope. I don't know that he would even say it was neuroscience but but things he learned from Malcolm Gladwell and folks like that.   Tripp: [00:25:57] And he started to say hey there's something here. When we pitch you know we need to be aware that for. For instance he talks about a lot about being the alpha versus the beta. That you get into what's called a beta trap meaning you have low status associated with it with where you are and you don't want to be there. You know how can you set up a situation where you're you don't have you know low status. So I see a lot of the strategies and maybe that's the wrong word to use that you talk about in the trusted advisor that kind of parallels some of things that that he's talking about in there but he's using the neuroscience or my words not his to kind of explain you know what's happening in the brain and why you need to be presented in a different way. And so I found that useful from my perspective because it's kind of like OK people are taking something and that's what made me start to dig deeper into this I'm reading every book I can find on neuroscience now just to you know what are people concluding. And you know interesting as I shared with you Dr. Zak and you know David Rock apparently at odds with each other. So I'm not sure of why but yeah.   Tripp: [00:27:12] So so there's I almost feel like we're in this world and where we got these kind of rough rocks if you will and they're all bouncing against each other and eventually all kind of smooth out into something and maybe it won't be. Maybe the path that you say you were not really learning thing we're new we're getting more reinforcement about kind of what we already knew anyway from interactions with people and in organizations.   Charles: [00:27:38] Yeah. Well again the I I was not aware of the conflict between Zak and David Rock. I'd be curious to find out what that is.   Charles: [00:27:48] But I'll bet you 9 to one. They both are in agreement or disagreement with what I'm talking about.   Tripp: [00:27:54] Yeah. But but again as I told you my my main thing is when people offer a perspective and you're obviously a just pick created and someone who's a een applying this for a long period time this person's got some something to say. And again that's why I wanted to have you on. You're very thoughtful in your in your approach to things and and you know I think people should hear. But you know what you have to say.   Charles: [00:28:18] I think you know just to stay on a little piece that you mentioned there you're really talking about persuasion and influence. Anybody who's interested in that. I find the most persuasive person in that area is Robert Cialdini who writes with I mean he's he's got legitimate scientific background but he writes more in the terms of pop psychology. Mm hmm. So he is first book called influence the science of persuasion lists. I think it's seven different factors that lead to human influence and some of them are pretty well-known. They're like act now supply limited or all your friends are doing it. It's telling to me and what I've taken from him and exploring the notion of trust. The first factor that he mentions and in his later life I see him mentioning more and more doesn't sound like that at all. It's the notion of reciprocity as in if I do X for you you will respond in like terms. It goes back to fight or flight. If I approach somebody in a friendly manner it improves the odds that they will react that way if I approach somebody in a an antagonistic fearful manner. You know you get back what you put out. And in fairness to Zak he actually mentioned his reciprocity yes at the front of his article as well he should. I think he's absolutely correct about that. The question I'm raising is having raised that which is the more powerful way to get that notion across to people in my own work. And again I spent 20 years in management consulting and another 20 doing this trust work. I have found it's far more important. For example are far more useful if I'm in front of a room and I'm trying to explain this notion of reciprocity a walk off the podium walk into the audience go up to some person smile at them lean over and extend my right hand in a gesture that we all know was a handshake.   Charles: [00:30:10] Well guess what. Every single time you do that that other person is going to reciprocate and they're going to shake my hand. Why. Because then it's just hard wired into the human psyche. I mean you can make a very good book on that ninety nine point nine times out of 100 that's going happen. You reciprocate now and so Zak and I agree on that. My question is who's more persuasive in standing in front of a room and explaining saying here's what's happened to the neurochemistry in your brain when I extend my hand. Or me saying let's look at a few examples. When you go into a sale and you do X or you do Y or when you're making a political speech do X or Y and when you look at this historical story that we all know from from literature what's going on here X or Y. Those are persuasive practical ways of getting a point across to human beings. And while there is nothing untruthful you can describe human beings one hundred percent in mechanical chemical ways. But depending on what you're trying to do that explanation is next to useless or it's terribly important. I mean let me be clear if we're trying to develop medicines pharmacological solutions understanding ways to improve brain surgery understanding certain psychological therapies I think the neuroscience stuff is critical. It's cutting edge. It's great. We should celebrate it and get more of it. But when you apply it to some of these other areas of inner human interactions you know and the utility is way down the list compared to things like storytelling examples engagement and so forth.   Tripp: [00:31:43] Okay. Yeah. And actually that's one of the things in pitch anything with a working class a part of the pitch is as a story to in order to ticket people's brains engage.   Tripp: [00:31:54] But I've got one thing I was gonna mention is I didn't actually read Robert's holding his Pre suasion book. I've not read the older and I have it the psychology influence of persuasion. There's a lot of great stuff in there.   Charles: [00:32:06] Oh definitely.   Tripp: [00:32:07] It's a very useful you know type type of book. There's another book I'd be curious on your thoughts about so called Decisive. And again it it it's written by Chip Heath. Oh yeah. And he talks about the fact that you know things like when you're going to make a decision.   Tripp: [00:32:30] People kind of narrow their focus in this kind of backs up some of the things Malcolm Gladwell talks about too as well especially if there's pressure on you. You have a tendency to narrow your focus and and by virtue of the fact that that your focus has narrowed narrowed that becomes kind of an either or type of condition when you're looking at making decisions as opposed to looking at multiple options. And he also then this into confirmation bias and you know he talks about you know things of that sort.   Tripp: [00:33:00] And and to me it starts to crossover and I think you know the fact I guess I guess this is what I kind of what I've concluded especially after going through some of Oren Klaff stuff. And even Danish stuff is you know the story has to be compelling. And one of the things his psychology seems to be old news and forget about philosophy philosophy is like all right.   Tripp: [00:33:28] Since the beginning a man right. You know associated with it and that's not to discount its importance in understanding although I have to say some of the philosophy books you know that are written are seem to be written for each other as far as philosophers go.   Tripp: [00:33:43] I mean I guess I can't get anything out of it.   Charles: [00:33:45] So right yes.   Tripp: [00:33:47] So it becomes very difficult and even Deming when he read Mind and the World Order you know he's he basically said started Chapter 7 and 8 it's that because there is the with. Yeah.   Tripp: [00:34:00] So because it's a little bit difficult to get something out of it I think people today and you know they're looking for that fresh thing and Oren Klaff really hits this hard.   Tripp: [00:34:12] I think even Sodini hits it hits it pretty hard is it has to be that that the newness of something gets people's attention.   Tripp: [00:34:20] And even if it's kind of the maybe not the right thing that they're looking for answers associated with Why is this happening and they're looking for fresh work even if it only supports what's actually already known right.   Tripp: [00:34:35] It hesitancy then to get people's attention.   Charles: [00:34:37] And I think that you know part of why the field of sales will never fall short. Everybody's looking for the newest band you know is like a breath short kind of reason going to be first in line. I mean what you just Yeah right is. I would call that kind of a universal attribute of people were looking for the newest shiny object.   Tripp: [00:34:55] Yeah. So it's in our nature you know like like say you like you like putting out your hand. Most people are gonna know that that's that's for a handshake.   Tripp: [00:35:03] It's kind of the same thing and so I'd say you know from one perspective because I've read you know and I've got many many more books so they want to read that you know associated with the subject neuroscience it's new. And people are saying what can I glean from this and maybe what they glean from it is the old lessons that we learned in philosophy that were then again really reinforced by psych. What did we learn anything really new there or was it just something that we conclude. I think and I don't I think it's too early to know whether neuroscience is going to have any any offering you know associated with that it's just there's too many I know for you kind of the podcast I don't know I think.   Charles: [00:35:45] I think that you know what we just said about newness and the attraction and the ability to let people discover new that's true. I don't think that's going to happen in this area. OK. I just by its nature I mean you know applying neuroscience to management and leadership is based on hope the thought the idea that if you can describe things in chemical terms it's going to lead to something you know terribly useful. I just don't see that happening much at all.   Tripp: [00:36:17] And I don't know how much of a play you know does it offer anything actually new I think is kind of where you go through its new science but does it offer anything new for the perspective that. But but if that's kind of a key that will help people.   Charles: [00:36:36] It's not it's not just new. It's also useful. Yeah I get a I'm I could I could given a new. Yeah this is you know neuroscience is new and fascinating just because of that. But is this going to be a useful again. I don't see it as any different than saying Oh maybe if we translate this into Latin IT'LL BE NO IT'S LIKE IT'S NOT GONNA BE USEFUL it's the same stuff.   Tripp: [00:36:59] Mm hmm.   Charles: [00:37:00] And I think it's it's a distraction. And by the way this is the neuroscience just through neuroscience. Let me not just pick on that. I do a lot with tech companies. You know Google LinkedIn etc..   Charles: [00:37:11] And as you can imagine the people who are adept in those areas they're super deep into analytical left brain explanatory deductive logical thinking and so forth. Those people tend to discount the more conventional wisdom soft skills stuff and so on. And in some ways that you know that the passion to describe for example I get a lot of requests.   Charles: [00:37:33] How do you measure trust. And my argument is Don't even go there. You know that then the compulsion to measure something is itself reflective of not really understanding the boundaries of usefulness. You know it's like if you had a conversation with your spouse and you said you know I want our marriage to get better why don't we set a baseline. Let's agree seventy nine point one on a scale of one hundred and then let's measure every week how I'm doing on improving our marriage if any spouse that I know of is likely to say get out of here. Don't treat this that way.   Charles: [00:38:12] And so the neuroscience is just one more in in an over inclination to reductionist thinking a little bit over belief that you know we'll discover the cures to all things if we can just get the the artificial intelligence stuff right and we can just scale. I mean look at what Zuckerberg is accused of continually thinking things are going to solve all these problems by just doing more connecting more people in more ways.   Charles: [00:38:38] Meanwhile there's issues and they come from exactly that kind of thinking well.   Tripp: [00:38:43] And you will find any argument from a Deming philosophy perspective. You know he would say the most important figures are unknown and unknowable. All right. So so so there's so yeah.   Tripp: [00:38:55] So from that from that perspective I would agree but maybe we are trained to measure something that that can't be measured can we gain new insights from neuroscience and how do we conduct or maybe a structure the way that the organizations I guess is kind of the question you're. But your response to that is you know kind of a definitive no no. That we're not going to get anything from it.   Charles: [00:39:22] Well again let's let's be clear. I would give ground I'd cede ground on whether we're gonna to learn something new and that's OK we'll say we're going to learn something new meaning in this case a different way of describing phenomena.   Charles: [00:39:33] The practical utility of that is really more of what I'm getting at. Yes. So if you can I would argue that about half of what we call trust. You can definitely measure about half a foot falls into the unmeasurable but even in the measurable. What do you do with the fact that you're going to measure it the default business response is let collect data on it. Let's break it down to the most discrete component that we can. Let's set goals and let's reward people for achieving those goals. Now if you're talking about something like reliability or credibility and you can you can somewhat do that. You can track people's performance against promises that's useful. But if you try to track people on are you achieving better vulnerability or even worse yet. are you benevolent beneficent towards your clients. Do you have your clients best interests at heart. Well if you start measuring how people have their client's best interests at heart and you start rewarding. For doing it you've just ruined everything. How do you reward people for being unselfish. It's self-contradictory. It causes people to mistake the measurement for the thing that it is supposed to be measuring and to behave in perverse ways. So I think that the ultimate question really is is it useful. And I guess that's my concern. It's not terribly useful.   Tripp: [00:40:48] So let me ask you this then Charles as far as what would be useful what's put us put neuroscience to the side here for a minute if we're to advance the thinking that's going on you know from a management perspective where would our time be best spent.   Charles: [00:41:07] Right. Well that's a great question. And let me answer it within the narrow purview of trust which is what I've focused on for 19 years now. It's a great example because trust also suffers from a lot of vagueness and lack of lack of definition.   Charles: [00:41:26] You've seen it all. All your listeners have seen hundreds of examples of headlines as saying new study shows trust in banking is down. Let's just take that kind of thing. Trust in banking is down and we all go out. I believe the study. I believe the statistical accuracy and relevance of whatever came up with. But what does that mean. It could mean one of at least two things it could mean that financial institutions like banks have become less trustworthy. You know just look at the news on Wells Fargo and. Or alternatively it could mean something very different which is that people over time and become less inclined to trust banks. That's a very different thing.   Charles: [00:42:03] The first one is a violation of trustworthiness and norms on the part of it would be trusted organization like a bank and they're in the right responses to that regulatory using the laws to prosecute hiring firing people and so forth. On the other hand if the problem is people become less inclined to trust banks that's a PR problem. That's a communications problem. Very different to go slightly analogous to that. The staff will tell you that in the United States in the last 20 years violent crime has gone down. That's a factual statement reduction in violent crime. At the same time fear of violent crime has gone up. So that's a case where it's the perception that the problem not not the crime itself. And if all you're doing is saying you know if you're a violent you know you're violent crime is up. Oh my gosh. That doesn't tell you.   Charles: [00:43:00] And I think it's like that in trust. So here's my answer you break it down it's practically humanly meaningful components and there are two there's a trustor and a trustee and the result of those two interacting is trust or lack of trust. The characteristics of a trust door to the person who initiates the trust interaction and they're taking a risk. That's the essence of of trusting the person who is trusted or wants to be trust dead is we call them trustworthy or not trustworthy. And the result of their interactions becomes a certain level of trust. So trust is a noun properly belongs to the result of the interactions. Trust is a verb properly refers to the person taking the risk and trustworthiness an adjective properly refers to those who would be trusted. Now you can actually do something. You know my little book The Trusted Advisor I think part of what made it popular was we had a simple for factor equation for describing trustworthiness. And most of our audience likes equations you know and that's their language. And we initially intended it just as a conceptual model for anybody interested it's credibility plus reliability plus intimacy all divided by self orientation. Two of those factors are kind of measurable and behavioral namely credibility reliability and the other to intimacy and low self orientation are much more interior psychological you know quote soft unquote kinds of things. It happens by the way that we have about eight years after we wrote the book it suddenly dawned on me Hey this a book a great many great self-assessment tool. So we pulled five questions together for each of those four factors. Five comes forward is 20.   Charles: [00:44:49] I don't know why I thought 20 was a good number and just seemed to forget and we put it up on the web and wait for the crowds to roll in. Well they trickled in but we've now had over a hundred thousand people take it and we can draw a couple of very clear and very interesting conclusions. I named two of them. Number one women score as more trustworthy than men. Not only that but almost all the outperformance of women on this score is due to their performance on one of those four variables. It's not credibility it's not reliability. It's not self orientation. It is intimacy. And by the way. If you sort of step back and say what would you guess. That's exactly what you guess. In fact I've given a talk about that Dana. Roughly 300 times and two hundred and ninety seven. Literally only three exceptions over the years I've been doing this. Which is about 1 percent only with only three exceptions. When I asked the group the crowd what do you think. They said women comments. And that's right up there with handshakes. Women I mean people say probably women and then asked the Guess Which factor. They're also pretty good at guessing intimacy. Now one more data point. There are lists surveys done by other you know by survey professionals Pew. Gallup Yankelovich who asked most and least trusted professions over the years and across different countries and very consistent results at the bottom of the list.   Charles: [00:46:15] You can guess politicians lawyers used car salesmen top of the list. People have a harder time guessing it's not lawyers it's not doctrines it's not teachers it is nurses nurses with with one exception in the past 20 years and then exception with the year 2002 where firemen were number one. That was the year after 9/11. Unsurprising but with every. And then the next year I went back to nurses. Nursing is an eighty nine percent female profession and if you had to pick one of those four attributes as defining the nature of successful nursing whether it's a male nurse or female nurse it's probably intimacy you know the job of a nurse is to make you feel completely comfortable sharing saying anything you know we are literally and figuratively naked in front of nurses. So it turns out when we ran a regression equation on the data that we had collected you know which of those four factors really is the most powerful describing trustworthiness it's intimacy and we you know we basically define intimacy as the ability to make other people feel secure and comfortable sharing things with you. Now is that is that scientific. Oh it's just the model that we came up with to heuristic we describe. you know what's going on.   Charles: [00:47:29] I don't argue that that has any more physical reality relevance than any other model. It just seemed to work pretty well and I still think it does. It's a common sensical definition and for what it's worth that's what the data show. And that also seems to get pretty general common sense affirmation. So what do you do with all that. That one's pretty clear. I can tell you what to do if you're an accounting firm if you're a law firm. If you're a tech support in a tech company you almost certainly need to get better at your intimacy skills. But what does that mean. That means having conversations in a certain way. It means having a certain amount of personal courage to bring up difficult subjects and to lead with it. It requires a little bit of internal development like you know get over your fight or flight take the risk of not all that bad. That's the kind of stuff you can do something with as opposed to 90 percent of what's out there on the subject of trust which is at the level of trust in banking is down or you know trust in Bolivia is slightly lower than Uruguay. Not that there's anything wrong with those descriptions but I don't think they give you a practical notion and that's kind of the same. The flip side of the argument I was having in neuroscience. What do you do with that right.   Tripp: [00:48:42] Well you know if it's history and probably so it can start to win this down a little bit. But you know in our emails back and forth you mentioned Alfie Kohn. Yeah. And you know so this gets into Debbie Deming philosophy with the four things you talked about earlier. Systems thinking theory variation theory knowledge and psychology and and one of the things that we find over and over again in organizations. No I can't say we did any at a depth of study but you know Dr. Deming worked with a number of and I've worked with many companies over the years is that reward systems drive wrong behavior.   Tripp: [00:49:20] Yes they do have an influence on an individual but right within the organization they will drive the wrong behaviors associated with it. So you know one of the things that that's coming from the neuroscience side is more what I would leverage to help support that thinking.   Tripp: [00:49:40] And that's that's kind of where I grasp on to it I think you know from a Deming perspective is you seen this stuff in there and then basically saying Yeah it does drive that. So in essence the wrong behavior. And here are the things and fundamentally you're right. I mean if I if I if I sat back and I looked at it it's not anything that people haven't written before but the fact that it is kind of new research that it gets people's attention to be able to say geez if if psychology is telling me that and philosophy is telling me that and systems thinking and telling me that in neuroscience maybe I shouldn't be doing that.   Tripp: [00:50:19] And yet even with Dan Pink's you know presentations Alfie come before him with you know can't. Contests and Punished by Rewards to books that really.   Charles: [00:50:29] Great books.   [00:50:30] Yeah. That that he wrote back in the Deming days right. Oh. When Deming was around. They still stand. And they science still stands but people just seem to ignore it. So.   [00:50:42] What does that tell you.   [00:50:43] It's in the culture. Like you said it's the handshake. You know everybody knows that it works. It does work. Nobody can refute the fact that rewards don't work. But it's how they're used and when they're used you know and associated with that. And you know Dr. Zak is a little bit familiar with Deming. So he I get a little concerned when I first started reading this book because he was with you like everybody else that I've written about neuroscience had kind of gotten into this. How do we make better a performance appraisals which is another thing. Deming railed against. Well. The answer is you don't do performance appraisals.   Charles: [00:51:17] Right.   Tripp: [00:51:17] I can give feedback without doing that. And you know so whether it's the reward systems or the performance appraisals some of the things that railed against all the science has pointed basically that we're we're doing this wrong and they talk about something that that compromises trust in an organization when bad behaviors are running. I've got to believe at least and maybe you have a different view on it is that were were designing systems or organizations in such a way that is self-defeating trust it just in the way that they're structured.   Charles: [00:51:58] Let me give you a quick story to that point.   Charles: [00:52:00] I was in first of all stories are very powerful because they help people come to conclusions without thinking they've been bamboozled into doing it. They want it allows them to put their own spin on it. I was standing I was giving a talk to the Top 40 or 50 so people at Accenture some years ago and before me was the CEO guy named Bill Green at the time.   Charles: [00:52:21] No no relation. And Bill Green had just finished outlining some huge reorganization for all of Accenture and somebody raised their hand and said Hey Bill have we lined up the incentives properly so that if I'm sitting in Australia get a call from our guy in Bulgaria I'm going to be incentive to do do the right thing and answer him. And Bill Green got visibly angry got up out of his chair on the stage. Any any leaned out any point and he said I never want to hear that question in this company again if there's ever any conflict between doing the right thing and the incentives. You do the right thing and we'll fix the incentives later.   Charles: [00:52:58] Now in that moment I mean it was a very impressive you know 40 people who were the leaders of Accenture got that message loud and clear in that moment. And that goes to how you actually do this stuff. You don't tweak the cheese for the rats in the maze. You do it by by leadership of living you know walking the talk all that stuff. You do it by repeatedly invoking a few principles and applying into very specific situations. So I think that the role of role modeling is particularly apt in and when it comes to trust. And my quick answer and then we're running out of time. My quick answer how you create this in an organization is don't do the incentives routine. This is higher level human stuff. What you do is you pick a few concepts a few principles and you relentlessly apply them. It doesn't have to be leaders who just have to be influential people who sign up by saying I think I know what we mean by transparency and right here this is an example.   Charles: [00:53:56] I think I know what you mean by collaboration and right here. This is what that means in this situation. So done right. There is room for tweaking and you know the various not nudges and all that kind of thing but the objective should be to create what I call a trust based organization which is an organization within which people individuals behave in trusting and trustworthy manners toward each other and towards all their stakeholders. It's not a characteristic of the organization. The key is not organization design. The key is certainly not metrics and rewards. It's creating an environment in which people behave in a trusting and trustworthy manner towards each other as individuals. And from that grows the culture and from that you can then say well this company is trusted.   Tripp: [00:54:42] Brilliant. Well said that's a that's not only a great example. But that's that's a probably a good way to conclude this although I do have one last question I ask everyone. It's when I people actually make fun of me for which is Is there anything that I fail to ask that you wish I would have. Or is there any clarification of anything that you've said to this point that that you'd like to take the opportunity to to shall offer.   Charles: [00:55:09] I'll offer one quick thing. The question you didn't ask is What's the one single thing people can do to increase trust and and actually as a simple answer we could spend another hour unpacking it. But it's basically listen and it's not listen to find the data it's not listen to verify your hypothesis. It is. As a sign of respect it functions just like the handshake. If you really listen to someone and something is very clear about this they will listen back. So if you want to be listened to if you want people to buy from me if you want people take your advice. The key is shut up and listen and allow the natural human response of reciprocating. And then they'll listen to you and everything gets better. So the key is listening.   Tripp: [00:55:49] Excellent. Very good. Well we certainly appreciate you sharing your time Charles. And like I said.   Charles: [00:55:56] My pleasure Tripp. Thank you.   Tripp: [00:55:57] Oh it's been I mean you've opened my mind quite a few things in this conversation. I'm sure you do that on a regular basis and people will appreciate that.   Tripp: [00:56:09] So thank you very much.   Charles: [00:56:11] Thank you.   Tripp: [00:56:18] Thank you for listening to the minor noodles podcast. We are currently offering a PDA titled Five surprising findings from neuroscience to help you understand your organization. Just go to Mind Your noodles. dot com forward slash five findings.   Tripp: [00:56:41] No spaces. Also if any listeners know of. companies or people applying neuroscience to their organization we are interested in talking to them. Just have them email me at Tripp to our IP. at minor noodles dot com.  

Café con Absa
10 Tecnicas de administracion del tiempo para ser mas productivo

Café con Absa

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2019 24:36


¿Quieres tener días más productivos? Entonces tendrás que aprender cómo funciona la administración del tiempo. Si quieres sacar el máximo provecho de tu día, y tu vida en general,  deberás aplicar ciertas técnicas, o hábitos que te garanticen la mejor  utilización posible de tu tiempo, o dicho en otras palabras, tendrás que  aprender acerca de la administración del tiempo. Las personas que han logrado triunfar en la vida, tienen el mismo  tiempo que tú, así que la única diferencia es la manera cómo estas  personas invierten su tiempo, los hábitos que practican cada día y las  decisiones que toman. La importancia de la administración del tiempo: Se dice que el concepto de la administración del tiempo surgió con  las técnicas de administración de Frederick Taylor, quien buscaba cómo lograr una mayor productividad de los trabajadores. No obstante, en este artículo no hablaremos de la historia de la  administración ni de los fundamentos detrás de esta ciencia. Aquí nos  enfocaremos en la importancia que tiene la administración del tiempo en  una época donde tenemos tantas distracciones, responsabilidades y poca  concentración. Una definición sencilla de la administración del tiempo, no es más  que la utilización óptima del recurso más importante que tenemos (el  tiempo), en la búsqueda de un objetivo. Beneficios de una correcta administración del tiempo: Cuando logras tener una buena administración del tiempo, disfrutas de beneficios tanto en tu vida profesional como personal, ya que no solo desarrollas hábitos saludables que te favorecen, sino que dispones de un mayor tiempo para hacer aquello que disfrutas. Aquí tienes algunos de los beneficios de una óptima administración de tu tiempo: Te conviertes en una persona disciplinada y puntual ya que sabes lo que tienes que hacer y para cuando lo debes hacer. Te vuelves más organizado ya que priorizas tus actividades con el objetivo de lograr tus metas más importantes. Se aumenta la confianza en ti mismo ya que logras cumplir metas que tienes estipulado, lo cual te hace sentir capaz. Cuando administras bien tu tiempo cumples con las tareas pendientes en un menor tiempo posible. Te permite anticiparte de mejor manera para eventos futuros. Cuando logras cumplir tus compromisos y responsabilidades, la administración efectiva de tu tiempo reduce el estrés y la ansiedad. Gracias por llegar hasta esta parte de la descripción, me encantaría si el día de hoy me puedes apoyar con un comentario. Ya que una valoración positiva en este Podcast sería algo fascinante y me encantaría leer tus comentarios, espero que no te importe dejar una review positivo en Google Play, Apple Podcast o donde quiera que escuches este podcast. Me ayudarás mucho a posicionar lo ya sabes cómo funciona el juego de Internet...y si no lo sabes, con más razón para que escuches de principio a fin todos estos podcast-. Déjame tus opiniones de este nuevo proyecto que estamos creando juntos tu servidor Absa García que es un complemento a mi canal en YouTube En definitiva, este proyecto me encanta porque siento que es un espacio super personal (no solo por la descripción), sino el podcast en sí. Cada uno de ellos los he creado pensando en cómo sería tomarme un café con un/a amig@ super geek y con los mismos gustos que yo en tecnología, estilo de vida y viajes. Bienvenido al mundo de Absa Garcia. Sígueme en mis redes sociales: Facebook Instagram Twitter --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/absa-garcia/message

If I Knew You Better
FREDERICK TAYLOR | Directing Your Future

If I Knew You Better

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 5, 2019 63:24


Frederick Taylor is an award-winning director & producer & the founder of Tomorrow Pictures (https://www.tomorrowpictures.com). I’ve known Fred for 30 years, but it was great to sit down with him and REALLY get into it all. Great first talk; enjoy! Theme music by Carl King, logo by Ronald Paredes. Visit crazyinagoodway.com for links & more.

The Unconventionalists with Mark Leruste
#115 How to do your best work with Aaron Dignan

The Unconventionalists with Mark Leruste

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 13, 2019 37:07


Let's face it, the way we work is broken. Frederick Taylor and his concept of scientific management was invented over 100 years ago on a factory floor for a world that no longer exists. And yet the vast majority of organisations around the world are still obsessed with the idea of maximising efficiency and minimising productivity friction, at all costs. The crazy thing is that despite the ever growing number of tools and technology available to us - that all promised to make us "better" at our jobs - we still seem to be overwhelmed and struggling. The good news is that we can change that reality. We can learn how to do our best work. In this week's episode I sit down with organisational whisperer Aaron Dignan, founder of The Ready and author of the brand new book "Brave New Work" (Penguin) to talk about how now more than ever we need more autonomy, trust, and transparency, not bureaucracy, to do our best possible work. I'd love to hear what you think of our powerful conversation! Tag me @markleruste and Aaron @aarondignan over on social media. I honestly can't wait to hear what you got out of our thought provoking interview. Mark SHOW NOTES www.theunconventionalists.com/episode/115 GET IN TOUCH Website: www.theunconventionalists.com Instagram: www.instagram.com/markleruste YouTube: www.youtube.com/markleruste Facebook: www.facebook.com/markleruste Twitter: www.twitter.com/markleruste LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/markleruste

Czytu Czytu
#34 – Grupy książkowe

Czytu Czytu

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 11, 2018 67:33


Cześć! Odcinek 34. Czytu Czytu można by podsumować następująco – dziś rozmawiamy o Murze Berlińskim i o seksie. Tak się bowiem złożyło, że wszystkie trzy wyruszyłyśmy w tym tygodniu na poszukiwanie wiedzy. Megu dowiaduje się więcej o podziale Niemiec po II wojnie światowej i o samym Murze Berlińskim. Kasia sprawdza, czy istnieje wartościowa książka dla młodych ludzi wkraczających w świat seksu. Ocia uczy się wielu nowych rzeczy o penisach. A potem jeszcze rozmawiamy o rakotwórczych grupach książkowych, z których pewnie zaraz zostaniemy wyrzucone za to całe szkalowanie, jakiego dopuszczamy się w odcinku. Przesłuchajcie koniecznie! Pamiętajcie też, że stale czekamy na Wasze maile pod adresem czytuczytu@podsluchane.pl. Do usłyszenia! Spis treści Co mamy w torebce: 00:00:52 – „The Berlin Wall”, Frederick Taylor (papier, ebook) 00:09:47 – „#SEXEDPL. Rozmowy Anji Rubik o dojrzewaniu, miłości i seksie”, Anja Rubik (papier, ebook) 00:21:50 – „Sztuka obsługi penisa”, Andrzej Gryżewski, Przemysław Pilarski (papier, ebook) Temat odcinka: 00:33:24 – Grupy książkowe Czytu Czytu prowadzą: Magdalena Adamus (Megu) Marta Najman (Oceansoul) Katarzyna Czajka-Kominiarczuk (Zwierz Popkulturalny) Jesteśmy częścią sieci podcastów Podsluchane.pl: Odwiedź naszą stronę: www.czytuczytu.pl Napisz do nas na: czytuczytu@podsluchane.pl Sprawdź inne nasze podcasty: www.podsluchane.pl Polub fanpage naszej sieci: www.facebook.com/podsluchanepl Zobacz nasz sklep z gadżetami: www.podsluchane.pl/sklep

Let It All Hang Out Podcast
Blunt Smokin' Betty White

Let It All Hang Out Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2018 32:59


Welcome to 2018! We are kicking off the year with professional fitness trainer Nicole Duncan, sales rep. Brandon Sartain and insurance agent Greg Gordon. As always, the wonderful Frederick Taylor is running the board. We delve into the Logan Paul youtube video, underage professional athletes, Elon Musk and an elderly couple that was busted with 60 lbs. of marijuana.

Let It All Hang Out Podcast
Casting Male Strippers

Let It All Hang Out Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2018 36:58


We are still here hanging out with Nicole Duncan, Greg Gordon and Brandon Sartain letting it all hang out. Frederick Taylor also came to hang out and kept us up to date on our hot takes. Nicole Duncan, our fitness expert, gave us some advice on being healthier in the new year and setting up a fitness routine. We also spoke to Brandon Sartain about his audition for the role of a male stripper for the film Bad Moms Christmas. Come and let it all hang out with us!

Manager Memo podcast
From the P.O.L.E. to the Pentagon

Manager Memo podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 4, 2017 44:21


Management concept rifts on the importance of the size of your shovel head, Oprah Winfrey, General James Mattis, tree stump removal, the significance of an office in the Pentagon E Ring, and Uncle Walt's garage. Thoughts and personal examples, based upon 30 years of military experience, on the management functions of Planning, Organizing, Leading and Evaluating. Classical Perspective introduced and the importance of Frederick Taylor, Max Weber and Henri Fayol explained.  A video associated with this podcast can be found on the link below.  MM 22 From P.O.L.E. to the Pentagon  

El libro de Tobias
El libro de Tobias: Especial Nikola Tesla

El libro de Tobias

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 13, 2017 81:21


Tesla representa una parte importante del conocimiento que hoy se enseña en las aulas de universidades técnicas. Sus contribuciones al desarrollo de la corriente alterna, conformaron la base de los actuales sistemas eléctricos de potencia y de distribución de potencia polifásicos, los cuales fueron una parte esencial de la “Segunda Revolución Industrial”, a la que contribuyeron, también, contemporáneos suyos como George Westinghouse, Frederick Taylor, Henry Ford, Gottlieb Daimler o el mismo Thomas Edison. Temas musicales: • Main Theme TESLA by Nikola Jeremic for Hollydan Works • I Will Rise (The Story of Nikola Tesla) by Renaiszance Presentación, dirección, edición y montaje: Asier Menéndez Marín Diseño logo Podcast: Origami Tales (Anais Medina) Diseño logo Canal: Patrick Grau Si queréis formar parte del foro oficial de Facebook (secreto, solo con invitación) entrar en http://www.facebook.com/tobiasenmuth, nos podéis seguir en Twitter @Tobiasenmuth y si queréis estar al día de todo lo que sucede en el mundo del cine, visitar el blog http://tobiasenmuth.blog.com.es/ Nos hemos unido al #PodcastActionDay de @OxfamIntermon en apoyo a #derechoarefugio Entra y ayuda con tu firma http://bit.ly/PAD4REF2 Canal de nuestra musa, la YouTuber Miare's Project: https://www.youtube.com/user/AchlysProject Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

Business Ethics and Diversity
Management Pioneers: Frederick Taylor

Business Ethics and Diversity

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 10, 2014 8:41


Frederick W. Taylor was a central figure in the development of management thought. Dr Susan Inglis looks at how Taylor gave credibility to the idea of managing more efficiently while paying workers higher wages. Find out more about the online Masters of Business Administration at http://online.latrobe.edu.au Copyright 2014 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy
Declaring Independence from the Tyranny of Taylorism

The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 4, 2014 59:33


Ron and Ed discuss the Cult of Efficiency beginning with an explanation of Frederick Winslow Taylor the father of so called Scientific Management. Business aren't paid to be efficient. There's nothing more useless than being efficient at doing the wrong things. Industries at peak efficiency are destined for obsolescence, think buggy whip manufacturers. Effectiveness trumps efficiency and creates true competitive advantage. Would you want an efficient or effective heart surgeon? This is why Walt Disney didn't produce Snow White and Three Dwarfs. The McKinsey Maxim of What you can measure you can manage will also be discussed, and why it's dangerously wrong. Also, why Frederick Taylor was wrong in treating management as a science, and Ron and Ed will propose a superior concept to effectiveness. That of efficaciousness.

The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy
Declaring Independence from the Tyranny of Taylorism

The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 4, 2014 59:33


Ron and Ed discuss the Cult of Efficiency beginning with an explanation of Frederick Winslow Taylor the father of so called Scientific Management. Business aren't paid to be efficient. There's nothing more useless than being efficient at doing the wrong things. Industries at peak efficiency are destined for obsolescence, think buggy whip manufacturers. Effectiveness trumps efficiency and creates true competitive advantage. Would you want an efficient or effective heart surgeon? This is why Walt Disney didn't produce Snow White and Three Dwarfs. The McKinsey Maxim of What you can measure you can manage will also be discussed, and why it's dangerously wrong. Also, why Frederick Taylor was wrong in treating management as a science, and Ron and Ed will propose a superior concept to effectiveness. That of efficaciousness.

The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy
Declaring Independence from the Tyranny of Taylorism

The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 4, 2014 59:33


Ron and Ed discuss the Cult of Efficiency beginning with an explanation of Frederick Winslow Taylor the father of so called Scientific Management. Business aren't paid to be efficient. There's nothing more useless than being efficient at doing the wrong things. Industries at peak efficiency are destined for obsolescence, think buggy whip manufacturers. Effectiveness trumps efficiency and creates true competitive advantage. Would you want an efficient or effective heart surgeon? This is why Walt Disney didn't produce Snow White and Three Dwarfs. The McKinsey Maxim of What you can measure you can manage will also be discussed, and why it's dangerously wrong. Also, why Frederick Taylor was wrong in treating management as a science, and Ron and Ed will propose a superior concept to effectiveness. That of efficaciousness.